


What the Thunder Said

by fluorescentgrey



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: 1960s, M/M, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, The Author Clearly Unpacking Some Things, Woodstock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27156590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Some stories we tell ourselves in order to live: March 1966 and August 1969, before, after, and between.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 41
Kudos: 104





	1. March 1966

The hardest part was figuring out what to put on his sign. His first idea was: _Take It From Me (Army Surgeon in Korea The Whole Damn Time) — We Have Had Enough U.S. Imperialism!_ But this wouldn’t fit on the only cardboard box flap he could scrounge up at work, which he had to detach from a box of penicillin vials with a scalpel when nobody was looking. He went by the liquor store on Pearl Street that he had frequented in ’53, ’54, most of ’55, and a tad bit of ’56, but by some twist of fate they didn’t have any cardboard boxes either, not even for an old friend, or they were withholding them out of some perceived slight, even though Hawkeye was pretty sure he’d singlehandedly sent their kids through college.

Once he got home, having been stewing about it and pacing on the top deck of the ferry in the spring wind, this interaction spurred another bout of spirited debate between himself and his father about What Exactly was happening in Maine These Days, or as his father called it, Time to Cue the Byrds, which was mostly just putting on the radio and tuning to the staticky college station and hoping “The Times They Are A’Changing” would come on, because the Pierce cottage at Crabapple Cove on the ass end of Cliff Island didn’t have a record player, or most other modern conveniences. (His father also hated Bob Dylan’s voice and preferred the cover versions of his songs by the Byrds and Joan Baez, though this could [and often did] lead to additional rounds of spirited debate.)

Upon these occasions, the elder Dr. Pierce would let his son rant and rave for five minutes or so about how he couldn't recall the lobstermen and craftswomen and all-around weatherbeaten weirdos of his childhood being the type of reserved and unkind and cold “it's your misfortune and none of my own” people out of an Edith Wharton novel who “weren't sure" about the Civil Rights Act and referred with incredible seriousness to the “Red Menace” and said everything had gone wrong (not exactly elucidating what they meant by _everything_ ) when Nixon had lost the election in 1960. Then his father would level his argument with some devastating anecdote in order to hammer home that Hawkeye had been looking at reality for a long time through rose-colored glasses, in no small part due to the influence of his father, but the Obvious, which didn’t need to be talked about in any further detail, had Happened, and the rose-colored glasses had had to be surgically removed.

“Yeah,” Hawkeye said. "It took them a really long time to get them off. They wouldn’t come right away, and eventually the anesthetic wore off. It was excruciating.”

“I knew I was gonna regret that overzealous install job,” his father said, turning his sad old smile toward the sea. “Don’t tell me you were pacing on the ferry again.”

Hawkeye put the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Can't a man walk back and forth when he wants to?”

“I mean to say, people’s selfishness is selective. Because if you were, I’m going to get a call from Jack Cyr sooner rather than later — ” he referred to his old friend, who captained the ferry route to Cliff almost every day and frequently came by the Pierce cottage for treatment for his lumbago — “asking me if things are alright.”

This was mildly enraging. After all, Hawkeye had delivered both of Captain Cyr’s grandkids and was involved in the lumbago treatment more often than not. But, in 1955, he had also drunkenly climbed over the rail on the top deck of the ferry while it was underway in the cove between Chebeague and Long Islands and stood there for a minute and almost let go. He remembered the almost letting go very clearly. It was a letting go one finger at a time, each finger being a different reason why letting go was probably the best idea. He was down to two fingers when Captain Cyr, having cut the engines, wrestled him back over the rail and socked him in the face. If it had been summer he would likely have been able to swim to Deer Point and would probably have survived, but it was December. The water was like a gray slush and the cold breath off it was paralyzing, intoxicating... anyway, not long after that he stopped drinking, so it was all a moot point, really.

Logically he knew the answer to this question but he still asked it: “Why can't he say anything to my face?”

His father hesitated. The radio, incapable of reading the room as always, segued into the Miracles’ “Shop Around.” This music was basically a public health hazard owing to its extreme level of contagion. Hawkeye’s feet started dancing without the rest of him, which was particularly frustrating given he was trying to make a principled stand about his mental hygiene.

“Maybe I’ll give you that,” his father said. “Maybe that’s New England for you. People tend to be averse to conflict.”

“But they love peeking through their lace curtains.” He mimicked it, like a little gremlin. As though he didn’t do it himself all the time, sometimes literally, because he was relatively certain their hippie neighbors were trafficking marijuana.

His father shrugged. “Everybody has a bit of innate voyeurism to their spirit. But don’t you know a psychologist you could talk to about all this?”

The moral of the story was always that nothing about the world had particularly changed. Or, if it was changing, it was changing by predictable increments, and encountering an outsize resistance, which was also predictable. Maybe people had a little more money now than they had had before in American history, but that had been changing for a while. His father was of the surprisingly Biblical opinion that money was the root of all evil. He didn't seem to understand why everybody in the world couldn't be happy in a leaky, drafty little house, patching up their neighbors and roofs and the knees of their dungarees, getting paid in favors, occasionally getting lucky at weekly poker night in the VFW Hall, and generally scraping by on fresh shellfish and jokes with a modicum of dignity intact.

This brought Hawkeye back to the matter of the sign. He ended up putting just the word _Enough!_ on it with a black paint pen (after all, there were plenty of things that _Enough!_ could be about) and wearing his old fatigue jacket and caduceus and Captain’s bars. Getting them out of the steamer trunk at the foot of his bed, where he'd buried them in sweaters and winter blankets and his graduation robes from Androscoggin and Columbia, made his hands shake a little. He wasn’t even sure why he hadn’t gotten rid of them. He thought maybe he had tried back in the Drunk Times and perhaps his father had stopped him. The Class As were definitely gone. He was pretty sure he remembered burning those. Something about the performativity and showboating. It used to make him sick to think they were even in the closet. But back in those days there was a lot making him sick (mostly the gin). He was sick all the time. It was over now, for the most part. The dreams were still bad. But how could they be anything other than bad, with the news?

So _Enough!_ also meant the following: 

_Enough Nightmares (Literal and Metaphorical)_

_Enough Bad News Every Goddamn Day_

_Enough Goddamn Nuclear Weapons Tests for Heaven’s Sake_

_Enough of the Motherfucking Draft, You Craven Filicides_

_Enough Being Looked At By My Own Father and All My Neighbors, Clients, and Friends as a Ticking Time Bomb_

_Wasn’t One Unsuccessful War Against Communism Enough? Nothing Was Really Accomplished Except Mass Death and Destruction: Take It From Me, A Witness to Said Mass Death and Victim of Psychic Destruction_

_Aren’t We Still Dealing with the Aftereffects of the Colonization of the North American Continent by Europeans? Can’t We Solve Our Own Myriad Problems at Home? Why Do We Pretend We Have Some Kind of Moral Superiority Justifying Unlimited, Bloody, Paternalistic Intervention in Geopolitics? Just Kidding, I Know the Answer_

When he got up around dawn on the day of the protest he went downstairs to find the biggest pot they had on the stove empty but for freshly boiled water and his father outside on the porch with a blanket over his lap, breaking bright red lobster shells apart with a rusty nutcracker. “Dad,” Hawkeye said, trying to be diplomatic, “you didn’t take the dinghy out, did you?”

His father had reluctantly agreed not to take the little boat out alone again after having fallen and almost drowned and/or cracked his head open a few months previous when he’d gone to check the traps just before a gale. But, turning to Hawkeye on the threshold, he said, “Of course I did, kiddo. You think I’d buy lobsters? Who do you think I am?” He feigned a kind of feeble blindness, patting the empty shells and the paint-peeling porch railing and reaching for Hawkeye’s face with his lobstery old hands. “Is this real? Is this Maine? Is this my son?”

He was almost grateful. He'd been worried his father was going to say something about seeing him in his fatigue jacket again. But still he was contractually obligated as an only child of a single older parent to try a vaguely admonishing “Dad — ”

“Hawk, look at the water. Look at it. It’s like glass!”

He looked out into the cove. He had to admit that it was. It was before seven in the morning and the light on the water was a cold silver. The buoys delineating the locations of the two decrepit Pierce family lobster traps were sparks of color against the gray and, like a weird slick ghost, a seal put its head up and watched the shore for a minute and then went under again. It didn't like the look of things on land. Who could blame it? “I’m getting on the next ferry, dad,” Hawkeye said. “Are you going to be okay?”

“You say that like I’m not making lobster salad today mostly so that you can’t eat it all.”

“Well, just for that, I think I might stick around and eat it all.”

“Nonsense. You have to go down there and represent the family.”

He didn't really have time for this, but he sat down in the other disintegrating rocking chair, opposite his father. It was in somewhat less crummy shape because of the three long-ago years he hadn't been sitting in it. “I know this is maybe not how your generation would do things,” he said.

“It’s also not how most people of your generation do things, Hawkeye,” said his father. He cracked open a particularly meaty lobster knuckle and instead of putting the meat in the tin bowl he’d use to make lobster salad he held the little nugget in his open palm until Hawkeye took it. “But it sure as hell is starting to feel like the only way, isn't it?”

He couldn’t bring himself to tell his father, I actually don’t know that there's any way at all. But I haven't tried this one yet, and it really seems to freak out the kind of people I hate, so it’s worth a shot. Instead he said, “It sure is.”

“Be careful,” his father said, taking his hand, not really shaking it, just clasping it tightly, the way he had when Hawkeye had gotten off the plane at the Portland jetport in ’53, and again when he had been sober for a month, and again when he had been sober for a year, et cetera. This was the way he said, I love you and I’m very proud of you. Not that he didn’t ever say that out loud, but usually he said it like this. “Don’t let the cops beat your head in.”

\--

Hawkeye fell asleep on the train to Boston and had a vaguely disturbing dream in which B.J. appeared, for the first time in a long time. They were alone in the OR together, scrubbed, masked, silent, waiting for the corpsmen and the nurses to put the bodies on the tables. Watching across the room at one another, breathing at the same time. Outside the unmistakable sounds of triage amidst a barrage of nearby shells. But they waited and waited for what felt like forever, and that horrible dread was gnawing a hole in the pit of Hawkeye’s stomach, and the light in B.J.’s face was dimming and cooling by increments, turning dark and steely, honing into that rare flashing rage, and still nobody came bursting through the doors, nothing happened, except that he woke up. The conductor was coming through the car, saying, “This is South Station.”

Out on the street it was maybe ten in the morning. People were bustling around doing their morning errands. Unlike in Maine, where the dying breaths of winter were still rasping over Casco Bay, it really felt like spring. There were buds on some of the hardier trees. On his way to the Boston Common Hawkeye stopped in a diner for a cup of coffee and the morning _Globe_ , hoping to clear his head. The last time he’d had a dream about B.J. was maybe six months previous. They were not usually appropriate dreams for public places, especially a crowded weekend train, for any number of reasons not requiring further mental elucidation. The last time he had heard from B.J. was via a postcard sent from the Redwoods State Park in July 1958. That was also at the bottom of the steamer trunk in Hawkeye’s bedroom, hidden even better than the fatigue jacket had been, along with the rest of B.J.’s attempted correspondence that had not been burned during the Drunk Time. The postcard was short enough to memorize after a few readings, not that he had only read it a few times:

_Hawk, I miss you all the time. I only wish you peace like this. I hope you found it. Your B.J._

The front of the postcard was a lot of tall trees and fog. A lot of gray and green. Primordial stillness. That was probably what B.J. was referring to when he said _peace_. That struck Hawkeye as a funny idea of peace, which he attempted to describe in a long letter. He did force himself to finish this letter before burning it, which he told himself was a step forward. It was certainly the longest correspondence he'd attempted to B.J. since July 1953, and the most nakedly he had bared his heart since the fifth day of that month, so it was probably good that he got it off his chest, and also probably good that he burned it.

He was always telling himself that there would be another chance and that next time he would be ready and he would take the bait. But that was the last chance. Maybe it was what he deserved. Occasionally his subconscious polished up all the old regrets and took them out for a joyride, blasting something heavy-handed (the Stones’ “Time Is On My Side” came to mind) on the radio with the windows down. Sidney would say it was a side-effect of thinking about Korea so much, with all the Vietnam news, and all the talk about the protest. But knowing why your brain was always out to get you didn’t stop it from staking you out at every goddamn opportunity.

He’d read the front page of the _Globe_ about fifteen times without digesting anything when the teenage waitress came over with his check. “Are you going to the Common,” she asked.

“Can you tell?”

“Well, you have an Army jacket on, but if you were a counter-protester, you’d be in your whole stupid uniform.” She blushed and put her head down and took his mug away. “My twin brother got drafted,” she said, shifting her weight in her scuffed saddle shoes. “He’s at basic training now. He’s going over soon.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye told her. “I got drafted too.”

“Really?” She blushed even redder. “It's just that you look, um, old.”

He laughed. “Not recently. It was for Korea.”

“What was it like?”

It seemed kind of poetic that it had come down, thirteen years later, to being asked a question this impossibly broad from someone who was probably born right around the time the war began. “Probably as bad as you imagine,” he said regretfully. “But if he’s with a unit as good as mine was, I’m sure he’ll be alright.”

The waitress’s mouth tightened. She probably regretted asking. Hawkeye sure regretted answering.

“Are you going to come to the protest?” he asked.

“If it’s still happening when I get off.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The boys from my school say they’re going to burn their draft cards. They said there's a radical priest who will help you do it.”

Hawkeye felt his eyebrow cock halfway up his forehead of its own accord. The dueling whiffs of illegality and absurdity (the phrase _radical priest_ alone sounded like kind of an oxymoron) were compelling, even though he logically knew this was probably how one went about getting the cops to beat one’s head in. Not to mention whatever happened to the card itself was immaterial. It was just a physical object: the draft board still had your name on file, and the draft notice could still come in the mail. It seemed like an act of aggressive futility, but then, so did the war itself.

“They said he'd be on the steps of the Park Street Church,” the waitress went on. “That’s at the north corner of the park by the old cemetery.”

He thanked her, paid his tab, left a big tip. Then he set off again up Essex Street toward the Common.

There were hippies in Portland, of course. There were always young people in colorful threads wandering on Congress and Cumberland, laughing, smoking pot, getting kicked out of record stores. For a while in the late ‘50s you could often find beatnik types down by the wharf at dawn, bumming cigarettes and looking for work on fishing boats. For the most part the people who lived out on Cliff Island had their own kind of countercultural psychedelic health food nature boy way about them, collecting seaglass, foraging for mushrooms and kelp and mussels, knowing the precise moment of moonrise, waffling about astrology and prominently displaying crystals in their homes. Dr. Pierce the Senior, his New York lawyer wife (god rest her soul), and their shambling alcoholic veteran son had always played the sort of straight-man role as the necessary scientific agnostics amidst this funky religion. So Hawkeye was no stranger to being a square in a crowd of scalene dodecahedrons, even though usually it felt like it was the other way around. He certainly felt pretty damn square every step he took closer to the Common. He was kicking himself for wearing his fatigue jacket, even though he was also wearing probably the hippest jeans a forty-five year old man should ever dare to don. Everybody else was like a peacock in full finery: suede, beads, florals, pastels and paisley bell bottoms, scarves, denim, patchouli and weed, cowboy boots, ruffles, velour. Even some of the men had ribbons and flowers in their hair. Some others wore head-to-toe black. They poured out of the T station on the corner of the park and milled around the old paths, strumming acoustic guitars or setting up camp beneath the bare winter trees.

And everywhere signs:

_End the war before it ends you!_

_Hell No! Don’t Go!_

_End Imperialist Aggression in Viet-Nam!_

Hawkeye unfolded his _Enough!_ sign from the inside pocket of his fatigue jacket and worried about how to hold it and tried balancing it on his head and tucking it into his jeans, which just looked silly. Eventually he settled for sitting down on one of the peeling green benches, opposite a young couple furiously making out, holding the sign up against his knee, and watching the people.

It was wonderful to see young people now. It was wonderful to see young people and they weren't hurt and there was hope on their faces. They were young and they were allowed to really be young so they acted young. Who could blame them? They acted like they had a unique sight: like nobody before them had ever seen how much about the world was broken. It made him smile just looking at them. He had noticed that things were very wrong and there was really no reason for them to be that way, but his best idea had been sending a cryptic telegram to President Truman and then trying to haul a latrine past the 38th Parallel.

It seemed like most people his own age settled quick. Like his dad was always saying: they got a little money after the Second World War and turned into gold-hoarding misers. They lost touch with life’s little mysteries. These people were to be pitied. They dressed in muted colors and sat around the formica tables in their prefab kitchens, eating casseroles, watching the news on the staticky TV and saying, what a shame. Saying, can’t they protest in a civil kind of way?

These people had no imagination. They had forcibly blocked it off. They had hewn their entire personalities and understanding of the world to an idea whose relevance was fading fast. He would have felt sorry for them — he knew his father did — if something about them didn't feel so dangerous.

Say what you would about the hippies but at least they had some imagination. Hawkeye wandered, listening to the speakers at the gazebo, filtering through stickers and pins and tie-dye t-shirts silkscreened with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo, all offered up for sale by stylish kids in colorful layers, burning incense, laughing, flirting. One boy (it would be presumptuous to call him a young man) held a sign reading _Tabs of Acid: $1_. On the edge of the park a few cops hovered and a handful of locals watched in bemused horror.

In the end, he couldn’t hold off the curiosity any longer and wandered over toward the north end of the park. It was the early afternoon by the time he made it to Park Street Church, where a crowd had begun to gather. The street between the park and the church was thronged with people. Music, laughter, bright colors, incense, pot… across the street, some of the businesses had boarded up their windows, and some high-up apartments displayed assorted political signs in the windows — some friendly, some not. Somebody had propped their apartment window open with an atlas and routed speakers directly against the screen in order to play _Highway 61 Revisited_ at top volume so that it might be heard on the street below. _Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes…_

Later he figured he should not have been so surprised by what happened next. It was another absurdity in the chain of absurdities that had constituted the painfully-close-to-forty-six years of his life on this unfortunate tiny planet. There was indeed a priest sitting on the steps of the church, though he wasn’t dressed like a priest, and in fact Hawkeye only knew he was a priest because he was Father John Francis Patrick Mulcahy. His hair had gone whiter than yellow and he wore a transistor hearing aid, and his glasses were a little thicker, but otherwise he looked almost the same as he had nearly thirteen years ago. He was wearing his fatigue jacket too, with the cross and Lieutenant’s bars pinned crookedly to his lapels.

Hawkeye had last seen Father Mulcahy driving away from them toward the 8063rd into the dust. July 28, 1953. Leaning half his body out the window of the ambulance, waving and waving and waving until the sun in the dust and the old smoke dropped an opaque veil of haze over the road. It was no good to think about that day — no good to think about that month, really. He supposed he had assumed Father Mulcahy was still over there, the way he tended to imagine all of them, including himself, in a kind of state of suspended animation. After all, toward the end, it had really felt like being inside a photograph, or some kind of Hollywood fantasy flick where war was relayed as a kind of coherent and limited item that could be neatly packaged into a box with a bow on it. Certainly some of this had to do with going crazy, but maybe not all of it. The human mind tells itself stories in order to live. That's why if you're hurt bad enough, there’s no pain. If your limb's gone, you still feel it. If you’re cold enough, you start to feel warm. If you’re crazy enough, you feel like you’re making sense for the first time in your life. If the endeavor into which you've sunk three-but-it-felt-like-ten years of your life and all the purpose you've ever known, nine-tenths of your very soul, and all the love in your heart — if it ends, you’ll find that somewhere in your brain — in your dreams — it’s still going on. In livid technicolor.

Somebody jostled him when they pushed by and it was as such he realized he had frozen in his tracks. It was a young man about the age of the kids who had ended up on his table all those years ago with bad cases of hot lead. The kid went shoving up through the crowd and joined the circle of rapt youths sitting around the old padre. Hawkeye could hear his low, reassuring voice. He was going through those Beatitudes and he had gotten to the best one: _Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God._

“Father,” said one of the boys, “in my church they don't think the war is wrong. How can they, when we know what God says?”

“They know what God says too, my son,” said Father Mulcahy. Hearing his voice was like being slapped across the face by nostalgia. “And they choose what to hear. We all choose what we hear. I choose to hear peace.”

“Hear, hear,” said Hawkeye.

Father Mulcahy looked up. Hawkeye felt like he'd been dropped into something on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, like possibly the frame of God touching Adam’s hand but with somewhat more clothes on. Holy light came down from the cloudful spring sky and bathed them in heavenly warmth. Time and age had given the father a sense of presence that was like confidence but not the same. Maybe it was a self-possessedness. A stillness, a quietness. Hawkeye felt like maybe he should get on one knee and avert his eyes or something. But instead Father Mulcahy got to his feet and pushed through the crowd in three steps and embraced him. He was laughing. They went laughing and staggering around together like drunks, trodding on one another’s feet, tripping on the cobbles and nearly going down together in a heap.

“Is it really you, Hawkeye?” Father Mulcahy asked, pulling away.

“If you want, you can pivot your little sermon to the return of the prodigal son,” Hawkeye told him. “Somebody said there was a radical priest around here somewhere. I gotta admit, I never in a million years thought it could be you.”

Father Mulcahy blushed a little. But he said, “I hardly think of myself as radical.”

“Burning draft cards sounds pretty radical to me.” Father Mulcahy shushed him. But there was a bit of a grin circling at the corner of his mouth. “Besides, I thought you were still over there.”

“I came back in ’62,” Father Mulcahy said. “They were recruiting pretty hard for Vietnam.”

“Even then?”

“Even then. I had to get the diocese of Philadelphia to find some use for me. The Cardinal owed me a real debt.” He leant close enough to Hawkeye to say sotto voce into his ear, “Seven card stud.”

“And the orphanage?”

“Soon-Lee Klinger runs the place these days. Listen, back at my hotel, in my suitcase, I have some photos…”

“I’d love to see them — maybe tonight we can go to No Name and take a look over some fried clams — but weren’t you in the middle of something?”

“I suppose I was.”

“I came to see some really hot conscientious objection,” Hawkeye reminded him.

He was entreated to _shh_ and hauled by the sleeve of his jacket back toward the church stairs and the circlet of teenage worshippers. “This is someone else I know you’d like to talk to, boys,” said Father Mulcahy. “This is my old friend, Cap— Hawkeye Pierce.”

Hawkeye gave them his laziest salute. His knees cracked when he sat on the low, cold marble steps. “Charmed.”

“Why don’t you tell them about yourself, Hawkeye.”

“What about it? I’m a doctor. I was an army surgeon.” Mulcahy had an encouraging look on his face. Maybe he was trying to help these kids understand that if they went over there, they were sure to either go nuts, or require to be operated upon by a surgeon who had gone nuts. But they all wanted to burn their draft cards anyway — they certainly didn't need any more convincing. “The padre and I served in the same unit in Korea.”

“Tell them what you learned about peace.”

“What I — hmm.” He had to think. He didn’t know if he had learned anything particularly important about peace. He didn’t know if he had learned anything particularly important at all, except how to do complex surgery at roughly the speed of sound, how to avoid being too hungover to work, and the precise boundaries of his own human limit on how much and how bad can be experienced before obliteration. “Father, maybe you remember this one: The day they called the ceasefire.”

Mulcahy nodded gravely. “I remember helping Nurse Kellye with triage until six in the morning,” he said.

“The shooting stopped at midnight. We had the radio on in the OR, we heard it. But we were operating all night and all morning. They threw bodies at that line until the very last moment they could.”

The boys were staring at him. Big eyes. Bodies that looked like yours, he thought. But then one of them said, “Then what?”

“Peace is a relative concept,” Hawkeye explained. “Both sides agreed to put a four-kilometer strip of landmines down and blast propaganda through loudspeakers at one another all day. It was like the war ended three times — when they told us, when the shooting stopped, and when the bodies stopped coming — but it isn't even really over. Does that sound like peace to you?”

There was a bewildered kind of silence. He supposed he should have settled for something with a moral, but he didn’t know any stories like that. Thankfully the old padre had the instinct necessary to avert a trainwreck. “Let us pray,” Father Mulcahy said, extending his hands. Heads bowed and the circle silenced. Even the music from above seemed to go quiet. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”

Leave it to him to pick this one. Hawkeye joined him along with some of the boys, voices rumbling in the strange quietude: “ — where this is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope…”

He’d never believed in god, but he’d always liked the sentiment. When they had finished the prayer with a chorus of rough-voiced _amen_ s, Father Mulcahy looked up and met Hawkeye's gaze. There was a familiar mischievous glint in his bright eyes. “Hawkeye,” said the father, a little apologetically, a little elatedly, “be aware that this might not make you any friends in Congress, but have you got a lighter?”

Hawkeye fished out his old zippo from his jeans pocket. He’d brought it along just in case anybody offered him an unsparked joint, but this was a much improved use. He'd no sooner flashed it in Mulcahy's direction than a teenage boy put a piece of yellowy cardstock paper in his free hand. At the top it said _Selective Service System: Notice of Classification_. It had been signed by a seventeen-year-old person named Edwin Walker with brown hair and brown eyes who was classified 1-A. “Don’t you want to do it yourself,” Hawkeye asked the kid.

Walker didn’t, but many of the boys did. In total he estimated he burned about twenty-five. Once they got started, more and more people started drifting over, some just watching, some producing the manilla cards from their pockets and wallets. Sometimes Hawkeye flicked the lighter to get them burning and then handed them back to the boys to hold as they went up. At the time, burning one's draft card was illegal by an act of Congress, and the Supreme Court decision ruling that draft card burning was an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment was two years off. But the crowd was big enough to lend a sense of anonymity, and the cops were nowhere in sight.

It was a pleasure to burn. Who’d said that? The cards went up quick. Some had just been printed. Others were worn soft from years tucked in with cash and social security cards and coins and girls’ pictures. A black and orange line traveled around their shrinking edges, shaping the rigid lines into an echo of mountains against the blue sky and the cobbles and the buildings. Up with the cards went names, addresses, occupations, classifications: all the various and sundry reducing of a young man to a series of interpretable and manipulable numbers. There were cheers as they vaporized, and the breeze disappeared the ash. Sometimes over the hubbub Hawkeye could hear the muted mumblings of Father Mulcahy praying, lifting the flaming object as though it were a sacrament. Maybe he was thinking of it as a sort of act of penance. Hawkeye sure was wondering why he hadn’t done this with his own back in the year 1950, not that it would have mattered. It felt good to watch them disappear into nothingness. With each one he thought, _they can’t have you — and they can’t have you — and they can’t have you —_

He might have gotten around to every draftable young man in Boston, but then somebody shouted, “Pigs!”

Everything happened very quickly after that. Somewhere deep in the well of instinct he remembered thinking, I’ve been hit. He had, in fact, been hit, but not by any kind of war ordinance besides the comparatively mundane body and truncheon of a Boston police officer. Whoever this person was — Hawkeye never saw his face — he slapped the burning cardstock out of Hawkeye's hand (it died on the ground like a butterfly) and tackled him face-first to the cobblestones.

It was funny how much and how little your brain could process in a moment of such profound crisis. He knew that he struggled, because then he felt a knee in the small of his back. Filtering through his mind were assorted woodcuts and watercolors he remembered seeing as a child in a school textbook about the early protests and riots in Boston that had started the American Revolution.

The person kneeling on him — “The geishas were a lot better at this,” Hawkeye managed, teeth scraping the rough cobbles — scrabbled for his arms and wrenched them behind his back. He felt the cool circlet around each wrist and then the handcuffs snapped tight. So it really happened in real life like it did on Dragnet, he thought as he was hauled to his feet. The world — the church, the Common, the colorful people scattering like startled birds — was a woozy blur. “Aren't you going to buy me dinner first?”

\--

“How did you know that prayer,” Father Mulcahy asked.

Everybody else in the big holding pen down at the police precinct, mostly hippies, vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, bikers, shifty-eyed thieves, a handful of hookers, and a vomitous crew of drunks, was being remarkably nice to them. At first Hawkeye had made some flirty and very loud comments about his rugged good looks before the hookers started laughing and he realized it was just that he was in the company of a priest. The father was remarkably comfortable in such an environment, this, after all, being roughly equivalent to the company of Jesus Christ. Assorted among their fellow prisoners had offered him water, a jam jar full of shelled pistachios, a sweater, and a rosary, and one had come over shyly to ask if he would hear confession.

“What prayer,” Hawkeye asked.

“The peace prayer of Saint Francis,” said Father Mulcahy. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”

“Oh, that one.” Hawkeye sighed. “It’s a classic.”

“It certainly is. I just didn’t think you were the type to know any prayers at all.”

“Well, you say that one a lot when you get to a certain point in A.A.,” Hawkeye explained. At the father’s questioning face he said, “Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s step eleven. You’re supposed to get in touch with God. It’s kind of a toughie if you don’t believe in Him.”

“Is it supposed to be kind of ironic?” Father Mulcahy asked. “He believes in you, even if you don’t believe in Him?” Hawkeye didn't know what to say. He didn't realize this was a joke until the father started laughing. “I’m proud of you, Hawkeye,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I thought you looked… very steady in yourself.”

“Ha. That’s maybe not so much of an elaborate illusion now as it was at one time.”

“You should take the complement,” said the father. “You could use it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Hawkeye,” said Father Mulcahy with the kind of extreme priestly patience and care that meant he was probably about to inquire after a delicate subject. Hawkeye steeled himself against the whitewashed concrete wall. “Nobody’s heard from you in years.”

“And?”

Father Mulcahy sighed. He was definitely about to level a devastating monologue, but thankfully, the policeman that Hawkeye had already started thinking of as the warden came to the cell door and rattled his flashlight between the bars. “Pierce,” he said.

“Present and accounted for.”

“Time for your phone call.”

“Can I bring my priest?”

Father Mulcahy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Excuse me?” said the warden.

“My priest.” Hawkeye swatted the father's shoulder. “I have a right to… ecclesiastical accompaniment.”

“Hawkeye,” the father muttered, “I don’t know if this is strictly kosher.”

“If I wanted kosher, I’d find a rabbi,” Hawkeye assured him.

“You do not have the legal right to have a priest present for your phone call,” said the warden. “You can, however, waive your right to a phone call, which I assume is what you’re suggesting…”

“Ha, far from it, actually…” Hawkeye got up, knees cracking, and hauled Mulcahy to his feet. “We have the same phone call.”

“What?” said the warden, at the same time that Father Mulcahy said, “What?”

Picking their way across the crowded cell necessitated skirting the hookers, who winked at Father Mulcahy specifically, and the hippies, who flashed peace signs and other prayerful gestures. This close to the cell door, Hawkeye could make out separate ketchup and mustard stains on the warden’s tie. “We’re planning to call the same person,” he explained. “To bail us out. I thought you might want to save money on the long distance charges.”

The warden rolled his eyes. His piggy mouth twitched. Then he said, “Pierce, put your right hand through here. Father, give me your left.”

He handcuffed them together before he let them through the cell door, warding away the other prisoners with a truncheon. Hawkeye’s wrists stung still from the earlier treatment and judging by the father's careful if fruitless effort to keep their arms roughly at the same length he was feeling similarly. They followed the warden down the hall. “Long distance charges?” Father Mulcahy asked. “Are you going to call B.J.?”

Their forced proximity unfortunately meant that he probably felt Hawkeye's reflexive guilty twitch. “I don't know his number,” he said, praying that the tone of his voice would broker no more conversation on the subject. “I can do you one better.”

“Who? Radar? Margaret? Don’t tell me Frank — ”

“God, no. I’d rather call J. Edgar Hoover. You’ll see.”

The phone booth was rather not large enough for two people at one time but the warden shoved them both in and shut the door. They had to engineer some very creative maneuvering to get to the phone book handcuffed. Hawkeye flipped to the Ws. It was only then that Father Mulcahy said, “Aha. I should've known.”

“Whatever our bail is — ” They’d said it when they were booked in, but the exact sum had gone flying over Hawkeye’s rattled head — “he probably ate that quantity in caviar for breakfast.”

“Hawkeye, are you sure this is a good idea?”

“You got a better one?”

“Let me call the diocese, and we can tell them to call your father.”

That was about the last thing Hawkeye wanted to do. “Are they going to bail you out with money from the collection plate? I’m telling you, it won’t be any skin off Charles’s back.”

Father Mulcahy sighed. He reached to pinch the bridge of his nose again but the movement lifted Hawkeye's arm and jarred his hurt wrist.

“What was all that about taking from the rich and giving to the poor?” Hawkeye asked him.

“That was Robin Hood, not the Bible!”

It didn’t take him very long to find _Winchester, C.E._ on Beacon Hill. He quietly thanked whatever higher power governed these matters for tuning Charles’s class guilt to the exact pitch that he needed all his society competitors to see his flashy address too deeply to keep his address unlisted. Finger on the number, Hawkeye reached for the telephone receiver, but Father Mulcahy yanked his hand away by means of their handcuff connection.

“Hawkeye, just call the operator and tell her to put you on to San Francisco. I’ll talk to B.J. if you don't want to.”

“You mean to put a man with a family out of… however much money?”

“Charles has a family, too!”

“I know he probably treats every little bottle of cognac in the wine cellar like a child, but it's really not comparable, Father!”

Eventually Hawkeye was forced to hold the phone receiver tightly between his neck and shoulder while he dialed the number with his free hand, as the cuffed one held Mulcahy back against the wall. He nearly got socked in the face, but when the phone started ringing there was nothing that could be done. They only got one phone call, as the warden had not hesitated to remind them.

“Hello?”

“Charles?”

There was a long, cold silence. Father Mulcahy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Pierce,” said Charles at last.

Hawkeye hadn't heard that delightful wariness since the last time he'd been of enough mental faculty in Charles's presence to be Conspiring to the best of his ability. “Major Winchester,” he said.

Charles sighed. “I thought you were dead.”

“I'm better than a cockroach. Listen, how the hell are you?”

Hawkeye heard the back of Father Mulcahy’s head thunk against the wall. When he looked back, the old padre was shaking his head in bemused disbelief.

If they were going to be trapped in here with the motley crew in the cell down the hall, this phone call needed to at least be hilarious enough to sustain them through what was going to be a very long night.

“I was at peace listening to Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony until — ” A pause suggesting the checking of a watch — “Thirty seconds ago.”

“I can’t say I’ve heard of that doo-wop group,” Hawkeye said. “Listen Charles, do you know the Beatles?”

“Please do not even… speak of what you call ‘music’ in my presence,” Charles said. “Now, what do you want.”

“I can’t catch up with an old friend?”

Charles laughed his sardonic little laugh. “That bold-faced lie alone has convinced me that you must want something.” He listed some potentials with a flat irony. He really was a comedic genius without meaning to be, Hawkeye thought, a little jealously. “Money. Drugs. A job. An education in culture.”

“Drugs? How nice of you to ask, Charles. Do you have any more of that speed?”

That made Father Mulcahy laugh. Now this was getting somewhere. On the other end of the line, Charles was spluttering like a fire hydrant. Who knew one could get such a nostalgic kick out of that splutter.

“Actually, it’s related to the first,” Hawkeye went on. “Maybe a little of the fourth.”

“Do tell me how so.”

“Can you guess where I'm calling you from?”

“I have no idea. Something tells me I don't want to know. Wait — is it Danvers?”

He referred to the state insane asylum on the hill above Route 1 in Beverly. Hawkeye was enough of a genius of regret to hear Charles’s — instantaneous, silent, except for a strange breath — over the phone. It was too bad, because the joke was objectively funny. “Yeah,” Hawkeye told him. “They finally locked me up. How about it.”

The grave and righteous tones on the other end of the phone about killed him with trying to laugh silently. “On what grounds?”

“Willfulness and hedonism.”

“Pierce — ”

“I’m kidding. That was a long time ago. The electroshock is underpowered, and all the nurses are shrews. Guess again.”

“Dive bar in Allston?”

“Closer.”

“Why must you torment me with these childish games?”

“Because I’ve missed it so much, Charles, come on. Guess again.”

An old familiar sigh came through the phone. "In the gutter somewhere? Sleeping under the fish pier? I give up.”

“Come on, Charles, this was just starting to get fun.”

“I’m hanging up the phone in five — four — three — ”

“I have another friend of ours with me,” Hawkeye dared, “if that interests you.”

Charles paused in his countdown, at least. “I’m listening,” he said.

Hawkeye lifted the phone away from his ear. “Say hi, father.”

“Hello there, Charles,” the padre shouted. Just in time, because the warden rapped thrice sharply upon the door.

“Have you two up and started a cult,” Charles asked when Hawkeye nestled the receiver back up to his ear.

“No, but you’ll be first on our recruitment list if we do,” Hawkeye said. “Listen, Charles, I haven’t got much more time.”

“Thank heavens.”

“Are you ready for me to level you with it?”

“Pierce, I can safely say that I’m not and I will never be, and that I would vastly prefer that you hung up the phone right now, but — ”

“We’re in — well, I believe they call this the drunk tank, even though neither of us have been at the ceremonial wine. And we were only mildly disorderly.”

From the other end, a silence. Then Charles said, “You are in central booking.”

“You could say that.”

“You… you… incorrigible miscreants!”

Hawkeye sealed his hand over his mouth to keep his laughter from exploding the tiny room. Father Mulcahy, for his part, chortled in his charming pastoral way, shaking his head.

“You honestly expect me to — well I suppose you always were rather loathe to except the consequences of your actions — but Mulcahy! I expected more from — even though he is — ” here, the disgusted tone deepened somehow further — “a Catholic…”

“Charles, will you come bail us out or not.”

From the static, he heard a nostalgia-inducing irate huff and mentally declared victory. “I will be there in an hour,” Charles said. Then he hung up the phone with such extreme violence that Hawkeye's ear started ringing.

"What have you done,” asked Father Mulcahy as Hawkeye hung up the phone. But there was a reluctant grin playing around his mouth. “He doesn't have any hair to pull out!”

\--

In an hour’s time, Hawkeye and Mulcahy were summoned back to the cell door and led, un-handcuffed this time, down the sterile hallway toward the reception desk where they'd been booked in the mid-afternoon. Outside, it was dark. Inside, Charles Emerson Winchester was trying his best to behave as a kind of shrunken Nosferatu in order to not be recognized by anyone.

The father for his part attempted effusive thanks, bustling on over with his hand out to shake and greeting their hooded benefactor with a grateful-sounding, “Charles!”

They were roundly _shh_ ’d and herded out to the brand-new white Cadillac parked half on the sidewalk outside, around which a cadre of local kids were snooping with a vaguely desirous interest. Charles shooed the kids off and piled Hawkeye and Mulcahy into the backseat. It still smelled new. The father ran his hand over the calfskin interior in a state of quiet awe. Charles got in the driver’s seat, mumbling to himself about cretins and miscreants and decadents.

“Chauffeur,” Hawkeye cried, lounging as deeply as was possible in the smooth leather seats and throwing his hurt wrist aloft. “Take me to the fish pier; I want fried clams from No Name.”

“You better shut your fried clam,” Charles muttered.

“He’s been talking about those clams all day,” Father Mulcahy observed.

“Father, the next time that you deign to visit Boston, hopefully for less spurious reasons, us God-fearing persons will take a day trip up to Plum Island and I will get you some far superior fried clams.”

In the dim streetlight through the front windshield Charles looked older, having lost even more of his hair, and the lines around his eyes seemed to be etched deeper. Maybe Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Massachusetts General wasn't all it was cracked up to be, Hawkeye thought. “Charles,” he said, “how the hell are you, anyway.”

Charles’s eyes met Father Mulcahy’s in the rearview mirror. “Is he drunk?”

The father’s mouth was a little tight. Somehow Hawkeye had forgotten that Charles and the padre had not necessarily parted on the best of terms. “It sounds like he’s asking you a friendly question,” he said.

“I think you'll find that the limits of my patience have already been reached," Charles said tightly, “and I suggest that neither of you test them any further. Now, can I take you to South Station?”

“It’s closed for the evening, Charles,” Father Mulcahy said. “You want us to sleep on the street? What happened to your Christian charity?”

“Careful, father,” Hawkeye said. “If you say that word too many times he turns into a pumpkin.”

“Which word?”

“Charity.”

“It seems to me like you have brought your sorry state upon yourselves by breaking the law,” Charles said. “I am not obligated to have any kind of charitable feeling for you.”

“It’s an unjust law,” Father Mulcahy said indignantly. “It’s a symbolic protest. A form of free speech.”

Charles scoffed. “It’s a meaningless act of contempt for one’s civic duty.”

“You sound like Frank Burns,” Hawkeye groaned. “This whole time I thought you at least were insufferable in a different way.”

“You were drafted, Charles,” the father reminded him. “You never had any contempt for your civic duty?”

Charles grumbled. Hawkeye cast Father Mulcahy a victorious eyebrow. “What’s that?” he asked Charles. “Licking boots gunked up your tongue?”

This, though seemingly true, was a bad mistake. In the rearview mirror Hawkeye watched in horror as Charles’s face migrated through a series of terrifying expressions and settled on a placid mask connoting pure, dastardly revenge. A chill slipped down Hawkeye's spine like a dropped silk negligee. Somewhat belatedly, the father gave him a reproachful glare.

Charles wound up and pitched right over home plate. “Whatever happened to your bosom pal,” he sneered, meeting Hawkeye’s eye in the rearview mirror with a soul-torching glance. He enunciated each syllable of the dread name with extreme delicacy. “B.J.”

“He’s in California being a husband and a father and a doctor and all that jazz,” Hawkeye managed through the wave of familiar nostalgic anguish.

“Whyever did you not call _him_.”

“Did you not hear the third word,” Hawkeye said, tipping his head back against the high leather seats. “ _California_.”

“People can wire money nowadays.”

“I wanted to ride in whatever fancy car you'd show up in,” Hawkeye told him. This was at least partly true. “And my wish came true. That’s all.”

“It’s just curious,” Charles said. Oh but he loved to pull a loose thread. “Curious indeed. I have suffered my way through enough debilitatingly corny reunions and chain letters and the like to know that none of the highly esteemed members of our former unit have heard from you, Pierce, since July 1953. I hardly would have assumed _I_ would be the first you would contact when you reared your ugly head from your… squalorous bower of… decadent hibernation.”

“What a slanderous remark, Charles,” Hawkeye said. “I’ve been sober since ’56.”

“Well, good for you,” Charles said, unfortunately sounding like he meant it. “Minor miracle though that might be, you don’t deny the rest of it.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Hawkeye said, aware that he was clawing at the edge of the cliff. Everybody was kind of cluelessly proving their own point here in asking why he hadn’t been heard from since the ceasefire then proceeding to grill him like a cheap steak. “We’re in Boston. You’re an archetypal Bostonian. Here we are.”

Father Mulcahy chose the worst time and the worst line possible with which to butt in contemplatively. “I told him to call B.J.,” he said.

“Aha!” Charles was like a fucking pig in shit. “Something happened, didn't it, Pierce?”

God damn it. Hawkeye had known he’d pay a price for this, but hadn’t foreseen this one. He let his forehead thunk against the cool window. “I haven’t seen you people in thirteen years,” he said. “Can’t we have a nice reunion with a trifle less tormenting me?”

“After all the fun you had at my expense?” Charles asked gleefully.

“Father, can you please share some Bible quote along the lines of ‘thou shalt not gossip’?”

“Sure,” Mulcahy said, “‘A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends,’ but it could be good to talk, if there’s something you want to get off your chest.”

“I don't want to get anything off my chest. I don't have anything on my chest to begin with except the bruise from that cop’s boot!”

“Hawkeye,” said the father with extreme gentleness, “we’ve all been very worried about you.”

In the face of these kind of psychoanalytic platitudes, Hawkeye's sinking feeling plumbed heretofore unexplored depths. Through the window of the Cadillac, the rain and the light smeared the street. At a streetlight, he caught unexpected and unwanted sight of his own reflection. He felt visceral surprise at how old he looked in the company of these people to whom, among others, he had given the last of his youth. Everybody got a drop until it went away. But he didn’t need to tell Charles and Mulcahy that war was an endless series of small dissolutions. By the time you took stock, you had nothing left. The specter of it was in the car with them now, but it was no less than what they deserved. Understanding, as he always did, against any and all odds, Father Mulcahy reached across the leather seats and softly patted Hawkeye’s knee.

\--

The phone rang when they were just sitting down for dinner. B.J. looked up and met Peg’s eyes over the steaming tureen of what she called Cleaning Out the Fridge Hippie Nonsense Lentil Soup. She grimaced. B.J. rolled his eyes long-sufferingly. “It could be the hospital,” Erin said.

“If it’s the hospital, they’ll call again.”

Of course, he was halfway through ladling his bowl full of soup when the phone rang again. This time Peg’s expression was more along the lines of marginally forgiving consternation. They had, at one time, had conversations like, when you came home from the war I thought you might have time to really be my husband. “Sorry, ladies,” B.J. said. “Go ahead and eat. I’ll be right back.”

In the living room he brought the phone over to the couch before he lifted the receiver, wondering which of his patients this could possibly be about. The lumpectomy he'd done earlier that day had gone over just fine without complications. There was also an amputation from a few days previous that had been a little more touch-and-go. Or it could be something new out of the E.R. for which they needed a surgeon with, as his boss had once said with an air of drama, “Battle-honed trauma skills.”

“Hello?”

On the other end of the line someone said his surname in the most annoying way possible. B.J. felt the familiar and disorienting wash of affection and powerful annoyance, somehow at the same time.

“I’m not Jewish,” B.J. said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I did not suggest — what?”

“Isn’t that the Festival of Lights, Charles?”

“I seem to remember there’s a T at the end of your name, Hunnicutt,” Charles said. But he really did make it sound like Hanukkah(t). “But if you’d like to spend this telephone call making fun of one another's accents, I am personally ready to destroy you.”

He had spoken on the phone with Charles a few times over the years. Usually he called around Christmas. Once he had offered B.J. a job in Boston with an air of extreme reluctance. B.J. had laughed until Charles had hung up the phone with a disgusted noise, but later he had mildly regretted it.

“Can this wait, Charles?” B.J. asked. “I know you struggle with the fact that other people have other lives in other timezones, but it's dinnertime here, and my wife made my favorite soup.”

“As… charming as that sounds I regret to inform you no, this cannot wait.”

“Is everything okay?”

“As a manner of speaking. Nobody’s dead.” Even through the static B.J. heard him heave a dramatic sigh. When they lived together in a tent the size of B.J.’s living room it would have filled him with a barely human rage, but now it was accompanied by a flash of warm nostalgia. “Hanukkaht, I have scarcely in my life been embarrassed or… put-upon the way I have been in the past two hours. It pains me to admit that I am out of my depth. And so, I believe they call this — ” He put on his most disgusted tone to relay such a crass idiom — “calling in the big guns.”

“Put upon? Big guns? Charles, what?”

“I have written possibly the largest personal check ever signed by a Winchester to the city of Boston in order to bail our bosom friends Pierce and Mulcahy from the clink.”

There was a lot to unpack in this sentence. B.J.’s brain was running alarm bells around the name _Pierce._ But later, he figured that Charles had brazenly admitted to years — centuries! — of tax evasion.

“The clink? Are they alright?”

“They are fine. They are presently sitting in my living room listening to — ” disgusted tone — “pop music on the radio.”

“What happened? They got arrested? For what?”

“Disturbing the peace… louche decadence… antisocial, un-American petulance… I don't know what they’re calling it these days.” So they had been arrested at an anti-war protest, likely in the company of hippies and dopesmokers. “Don’t misunderstand me, Hanukkaht,” Charles continued, “I don’t support war in Vietnam. But there is a right way and a wrong way to go about one’s opposition and they have placed themselves squarely in the wrong camp.”

“Sure,” B.J. said, not wanting to wade into this stupid debate on the phone. “Charles, I don't understand what you want me to do.”

“Well, isn’t it obvious. I want you to speak to him.”

“Who?”

“Pierce.” He still said it like _Pehhhhce._ “Obviously.”

B.J.’s heart made some big dramatic move. “Why?”

“You are the only person I have ever known who could go toe-to-toe with his sheer audacity.”

“Well, Charles, you didn't do so bad yourself,” B.J. said, “but if you want me to tell him to knock off the louche decadence, I’m afraid I can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Maybe I’m a louche decadent too. Maybe people don't tend to take kindly to being told not to be themselves by somebody they haven't spoken to in thirteen years.”

Only static came over the line, but B.J. could practically see Charles doing his gawping fish mouth thing.

“Put him on,” B.J. said, steeling himself. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Will you just — and don’t tell him I told you — tell him to be careful?”

“Of course I will.”

“Hm,” said Charles. “You can be a prince when you want to, Hanukkaht. Now listen, how’s your family?”

“Oh, jeez, Charles, just put him on, will you, before I lose my nerve?”

There was some grumbling and bumbling and the sound of the receiver on the other end being set down. Peg poked her head into the living room. Her face made a question. B.J. gave her the thumbs up.

“I put your soup in a pot on the stove,” she whispered. “You can heat it up when you’re ready.” Then she went back in the kitchen; he heard the radio, dishes in the sink, Erin's reluctant, embarrassed teenage laughter…

Peg was going to get a real kick out of this when he told her about it. B.J. had gotten back from Korea anticipating that being in her presence was going to be like some kind of opposite radiation that healed him faster the nearer he stood to it. When it wasn't like that, he started spending a lot of time drinking whiskey in front of the fire, sleeping maybe three hours a night, getting fired from the rich people's clinic in Marin, so that he went to work at the public hospital in Oakland, which led to even less sleep and even more whiskey… And then there was the big fight with the postal worker where B.J. drunkenly accused her one Saturday morning of withholding his mail because there was no way everybody from over there and their mother had written him and Hawkeye hadn't. There was quite simply no way, and he’d sent maybe fifteen letters and nothing had come back marked _deceased_ or _undeliverable_ , so what was the fucking deal? Not very long after that — this was in the summer of ’57 — Peg had come in to sit with him by the fire with an advertisement from the paper. It said: _Volunteers Wanted for Special, Safe Experiment. Veteran’s Administration Hospital, Richmond CA._

“Experiment,” B.J. read aloud, skeptically.

“A friend of mine did it,” said Peg, resting her hand gently on his bicep. “You know, her husband's a gas passer there. The way she talked about it, I thought it might help you.”

“Help me?”

“Don’t even pretend like you don't need help, honey.”

In the morning B.J. called from the break room at Oakland General and made an appointment. It ended up being a lot less scary than he had expected. He talked to a doctor, and then he took a capsule of what they called “a psychotomimetic compound,” and then he and the doctor kept talking, except that things began to change shape and shift. He gradually came to the understanding that all of reality was malleable if prodded. Nothing was innately anything. Even truth was an elaborate fiction. Everything was a story that humans had told themselves. He did not remember even feeling so free as a child. At some point he said to the doctor something like, there’s no innate law but love, and she said, tell me about love. He said that the love he felt for his daughter was the purest love he ever thought a person could feel. It was the height of love. It was probably the reason for the invention of the word love. So much as thinking about how much he loved Erin made the world glow. It was a gold light. He’d loved her since she was only an idea. Then he loved her when she was only a symbol. And now he loved the person that she was. And he had watched her become a person! He had missed some of her becoming a person, which was never going to be less than the biggest regret of his life, and yet… and yet! There was becoming to watch every day, and that was a small consolation. The doctor asked him about his wife. He said he loved Peg, of course he did, what else was there to say? Peg saw him. The doctor asked if there was anyone or anything else and he said, I had this friend that I treasured more than anything. Is that the same? It could be, said the doctor. Tell me about that love. Well, B.J. said, it was like breathing. It just was. Sometimes it was all that was. It was: he took a breath and he felt the entire world expand and contract with him. It was: as sure as he was that he had a soul, a self, even at the worst of it, that there was something inside that was alive, so he could see Hawkeye’s — he could see it! That was another soul. That was the most wondrous and unforgettable of all the other souls he’d known. He knew the exact shape of that other soul, so that sometimes at night at the edge of sleep he knew they touched one another’s dreams. He had never known anything so sure! It was the easiest and the hardest thing in the world, because he could never — this was when he started crying and the doctor started passing him tissues — he could never see it for what it was. But he saw Hawk suffering and somewhere inside he knew exactly why but he couldn’t do a thing about it because he was too afraid to even name what it was. He was afraid to understand what he knew now, which was that if that was real, it meant all these strictures that governed reality were false. Every current that had shaped his life was manufactured. God, if only he hadn’t been such a coward he could have — but now he could see that it wasn’t only cowardice. It was also blindness. Couldn’t she see? The doctor nodded and said yes she could. If everything was just a story people tell themselves… Oh god! He felt like he had kicked his way through the wall of some prison, having not even known he’d been in prison. The light washed over him. Is everybody in this prison, he asked the doctor when he could speak again, and she said no. But many many people are. I would even hazard to say most people are.

Peg came to pick him up. When she could, she took her hand off the gearshift to tap their wedding rings together to the tune of the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day,” which the college station was playing seemingly every fifteen minutes. “How was it,” she asked when he’d stopped crying.

“I’d never thought about some things — never been able to even see… some things, until just then,” he said, then he got choked up again.

“Is it about being in love with your friend Hawkeye?” When he didn’t — couldn’t — respond, because he was too occupied doing Charles’ gawping fish mouth thing, she said, “Oh, thank god.”

“What?”

“Honey, I thought you might never get it.” She tapped their wedding rings together again. She was really smiling. The light was breaking through the clouds onto the bay showing the depths and shallows and the container ships spilled like game pieces across a broken blue board… “Good,” Peg said. “That’s good.”

The whole thing, the psychotomimetic therapy as they called it, made things harder and easier. It made him and Peg better friends than they were lovers, but that was alright. They were good co-parents and both good cooks. Peg had a girlfriend named Melinda from back in the day at Mills College that she saw sometimes, and B.J. went out to bars in the Castro and slow-danced with other men, though they never felt right in his arms, they were always too tall, too short, too fit, too still, too quiet… Otherwise, some nights, he and Peg would lie together in their marital bed with a joint talking as quietly as they could about all the things that seemed dangerous to talk about in the day. Peg cut her hair. B.J. didn’t. They went to concerts and protests and tie-dyed their old clothes. By the time the mid-‘60s rolled around and strange people started to show up in the Haight-Ashbury he figured he and Peg were living that whole hippie-dippie life better than the hippies did, even if they were a good fifteen years too old.

Anyway, Peg had been telling him since roughly ’58 to get over it, albeit in gentler terms. She probably knew he hadn’t. He himself had been wishing desperately for a do-over since July 5th, 1953. He was old and wise enough now to understand whatever this was wouldn't be that. But it had to be something. He had been waiting for a very long time.

The last letters he'd sent, he’d stood in front of the mailbox in the sun holding them to his chest, thinking as hard as he could: _This time you will write back. You will. You will._ It was just like the universe to answer his prayers once he’d nearly forgotten he’d made them in the first place.

\--

A CONVERSATION PRESENTED ONLY IN DIALOGUE:

[ Crackles, rustling ]

“Hello?”

“Hawkeye?”

[ Silence too prolonged to be comfortable ]

“Hawk, are you still there?”

“B.J. I’m here.”

[ Silence too prolonged to be comfortable ]

“Well how the hell are you?”

[ Forced laughter ] “Fine! Fine. Charles called you?”

“He said you and Father Mulcahy were arrested. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. Got a summons. There’ll be a fine — it’s nothing. You know Charles. He probably hates that his Cadillac might’ve been recognized outside central lockup.”

“Charles has got a Cadillac?”

“Imagine Charles in the form of a vehicle. Dignity to the point of silliness.”

[ Silence, still too prolonged to be comfortable, but getting warmer. Someone’s shaky exhale. ]

“What’re you doing in Boston?”

“Just came down for the Days of International Protest.”

“Yeah, we were out today ourselves. Well, good on you. Hard to believe the cops would arrest a priest.”

“Well, he was holding three flaming draft cards at the time.”

[ Raucous laughter joined by tentative laughter ] “Really? Mulcahy?”

“L.B.J. won't accept his challenge to a welterweight bout, I guess.”

“That'd be a matchup I’d pay to see.”

“Are you kidding, Mulcahy’d defrock him in a second.” [ Pause ] “But I’d pay to see it too.”

[ Laughter drifting into amicable silence and two people on opposite sides of the continent closing their eyes so as to listen as deeply as possible into the mystery to hear as much as might be audible of one another's lives ]

“Hawk, tell me really. How the hell are you.”

[ Pause, sigh ]

“I’m on pins and needles, tell you the truth. Because I feel like a real cad, not ever writing back to you.”

“It’s water under the bridge.”

“I only know I’m sorry for it now.” [ Pause ] “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“And yours.” [ Electric, incredulous laughter ] “It’s more than good. God — I forgot — but I’m only so glad.” [ More of that laughter, intimidating, terrifying, contagious ] “Charles, huh?”

“You should've heard him when we called from the phone booth at the precinct. Beej, I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Nor the last time I was called an _incorrigible miscreant_.”

“Now that’s a delightful Winchesterism. I expect he's withholding his good cognac on purpose.”

“He actually let the Father have a little in a snifter before bed.”

“Why not you?”

“Because I’ve been sober for about ten years.” [ Laughs ] “I had a glass of warm milk.”

“Well, good on you, Hawk.”

“It’s — maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but sometimes, when I can get it, I smoke a little dope, you know. But no booze since… February ’56.”

“Ten years.”

“Feels like yesterday.”

“Do you miss it?”

[ Pause ] “I miss laughing like that. Like we used to.”

“Me too. More than anything, sometimes. Listen, will you write to me, now that we’ve ripped the bandaid off?”

“Thirteen years is a long time to have a bandaid on.”

“Don’t I know it. But — listen, I’d like nothing more. I’d say I missed you but it's more — but it's less. It’s just always going. Listen, in the Haight today, there were these musicians — you ever hear someone play the sitar? In Indian music, there’s always someone playing just a long harmonic drone, and after a while listening you don't even really hear it, but it’s always there. And that’s how I miss you.”

[ Pause. Shuffling, a long sigh ]

“Hawk — ”

“You know, I remember all those…” [ Pause ] “…all those silly things I said.”

“Hawk, that doesn't exactly narrow it down.”

“And yet I know you know what I’m talking about.”

[ Pause ]

“I don’t think those were silly things.” [ Pause ] “I took them very seriously.”

“That's for sure.”

“I meant what I said. I wish I said it better but… Did you mean what you said?”

“I seem to recall that I asked you not to humor me.”

[ Aghast silence ]

“You know, for someone with crippling abandonment issues, you really give as good as you get!”

“Excuse me? You know, for the whole rest of July ’53 you treated me like I was radioactive!”

“You have a real knack for self-sabotage, you know that? How much more clearly can I tell you I’m sorry and I still want — I need you in my life? Sometimes I think you must have some kind of goddamn selective deafness.”

[ Hurt, but not a new hurt, a very old one ] “You already have everything you need, Beej.”

“You don't know that. And you can’t make that decision for me.”

[ A pre-thunderstorm type silence ]

“You still there, Hawk?”

“You know, it always pains me to have to tell you you’re right.”

“Why's that?”

“I don’t know. Normally I don’t mind massaging your ego. I usually think you deserve it.” [ Sighs ] “I miss you too. You know, terribly, tragically, and all that. Every day. Like a limb.”

“And I you. You better write me.”

“I will.”

“You mean it?”

“I will. I promise.”

[ Shuffling, muffled speaking ]

“Charles is on my case about running up his phone bill with long-distance jibber jabber.”

“Jesus! _He_ called _me_!”

“I know, I know. Listen, I’m glad he did, aren’t you?”

“More than. Hawk, you better write me, I mean it. And be careful. Charles told me to tell you that.”

“I will. I’ll write, I mean it. I’ll see you.”

“You’ll see me?”

[ Singing ] “I’ll be seeing you — ”

“Goodbye, Hawk.”

“Goodnight, Beej.”

\--

Around dusk on July 5th, 1953, when B.J. got to the pile of wreckage that had until moments previous been their Officers Club, Hawkeye was struggling out of the jeep, shoving corrugated tin and splintered timbers out of his way. “Can you believe this,” he said at sight of B.J. There was a thin laceration at his hairline shedding typically incredible amounts of blood. “Who fucking put this here?”

That he was not himself was obvious. It had been a long time since B.J. had seen something like this. When you were a general practitioner at a public hospital you saw it all the time. Sometimes people just snapped. When they did, it was like the spark of their self was dampened and replaced by something similar but not quite the same. The way somebody in this condition wore their body was wrong only by the slightest degree, so that often you couldn’t see it unless you were really looking. But B.J. was really looking. A chill raked his spine. The trick was to start with the concrete obvious. “Hawk,” he said, putting his hands out as a gesture of threatlessness, as though he were talking to a skittish horse, “you’re bleeding.”

“What is this doing here?” Hawk asked him. He dragged a bloody shaking hand through his bloody hair. “I mean, what is it doing here? What is _it_ doing _here_? You know, if this were a movie I would say the whole thing was damn heavy-handed. It isn’t supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be here — nothing is supposed to be here. Nothing! There’s supposed to be nothing here, Beej!” He put his filthy clawed hand to his own chest. “There’s supposed to be nothing here!”

B.J. hadn’t heard about anything that had happened in the OR; he’d been outside doing triage, and then he'd seen Kellye escort Hawk out. He figured he knew what it was about. They’d all tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. Of course it wasn’t his fault. They all felt terrible about it. It was nobody’s fault, or otherwise the fault was diffuse in the air. It was the war’s fault. But Hawk was the kind of person who needed to know who was responsible.

He was still going, but he was pacing now. B.J. was out of his depth. Behind him in the compound he heard a quiet and growing commotion.

“Darling.” Hawkeye peered into B.J.’s eyes. “It appears they’ve cancelled our reservation. We must not be the right kind of people to be seen in a place like this. I know, I’m as embarrassed as you must be. I only can’t help but feel that it’s what we deserve. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep, et cetera, et cetera. But how can we laugh at all? Aye, there's the rub — how can we laugh at all? Tell me, Beej, how can we laugh at all?”

“Hawk,” B.J. said. He had the feeling anything he said would be the wrong thing. “We need — we all need some way, to, uh, to escape — ”

“Escape! You mean forget! Well I don’t want to forget, I can’t forget — I don’t remember, I don’t remember, but I know I can't forget, how could I forget? Do you think when this is over any of these people will forget what we did to their country? How could we deserve to forget? We deserve to feel every cut we ever made. You too, you bastard. You think you’ll go home and it’ll make you clean again? Just like that? I wish you'd feel every cut you ever made.”

“I do,” B.J. said. “I do, Hawk, and I know you do too, it’s just, you cover it up — ”

“Sure I cover it up,” Hawk said; he kept coming close to B.J. and then backing away, turning, catching glimpse of the wreckage of the O Club, backing away, turning… the blood had saturated the collar of his fatigue jacket now — “like a goddamn landmine! Every time I cover it up, every time I forget, I can’t remember where I put it, and I can't see it until I touch it, and it blows me to pieces, to pieces, every time, and the vultures eat my liver every night and then it grows back but I can’t remember what I did, I can’t — I can't remember what I did!”

“You didn’t do anything, you didn’t — I swear.” How to make it stop? He might have said anything. Whenever Hawkeye came close B.J. reached for him and missed. He might have been missing on purpose. “You didn't do anything, you couldn’t’ve done anything — ”

“But I could have, I could’ve, I could’ve, and we shouldn’t’ve, how could we have, how could we, why? The beach? Why, was it worth — was it all worth — I could’ve told her, I should’ve just told her, I could have, but she — ”

He clapped his hand over his mouth and met B.J.’s eyes with an expression of abject terror. Then he screamed into his hand. It was possibly the worst sound in all of it. All the years. It was worse than the choppers. Fate or retribution or whatever invisible spirit was with them kneecapped him and he faltered and B.J. caught him. He was not much there. He was the very faint little light inside his body. B.J. had a single very dangerous thought that he felt more deeply than anything he could remember in his life and so, as such, repressed for years, until the psychotomimetic therapy, which was, why can’t I fold him up and put him inside my heart where he’ll be safe?

It had to be over now, B.J. thought. It had to be over, because how could he go on? How could they all go on?

“B.J.”

The voice came from his quarter. It was Colonel Potter. He was holding a syringe.

“Oh, no,” said Hawkeye, struggling in B.J.’s straitjacket embrace. He laughed a little and it was like someone had stuck a tube in his normal laugh and drained all the color from it. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I won’t go in for — that stuff killed Hank Williams!”

“Nonsense,” Potter said. “It was the mixing that did him in. Are you loaded up on bourbon and morphine?”

“Colonel,” Hawkeye said, twisting, “I know you made it just in time for act two, so maybe Captain Hunnicutt needs to brief you on the monologue I just delivered.”

Potter’s eyes were red-rimmed. Standing there in his pilled old bathrobe, a full foot shorter than the struggling leviathan of his so-called captains. “Well, give me the gist of it, Hunnicutt.”

“He said he thinks all of us should feel every cut we ever made,” B.J. said dully. His voice sounded like he was delivering an omen of doom. He supposed it was that. “Even the ones that we can't remember making.”

“Whatever you’re going to do to me,” Hawkeye summarized, “I don’t want anesthesia.”

There was hardly any fight left in him, but it still took five of them — Potter and B.J., plus Kellye and Margaret, with a much-belated assist from Charles — to get him still enough to get the syringe in his arm. B.J. felt, intimately, when the drug rolled Hawk’s mind up and threw it out the window. Every last taut cord broke at once. He probably should have foreseen this, but now that Hawk was unconscious B.J. found himself even more reluctant to let go. Potter had to gently loosen his hands. “Klinger,” he was saying, checking Hawk’s pulse and pupils, looking like a country doctor, or a worried father, “did you get Sidney on the horn?”

“He’s sending someone up, sir,” Klinger said. That even he sounded disturbed was deeply unsettling.

“Fine. You better get Tokyo on and tell them we need another rent-a-cutter and not to send one with debilitating battle fatigue this time.”

“What are we going to say in the daily report?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are we going to say about — ”

He gestured toward what remained of the O Club. The moonlight on the collapsed structure made it look like a haunted house.

Potter sighed. “The brakes on that jeep were bad.”

“They were?”

“I’ll sign the paperwork that says they were,” Potter said, fixing Klinger with one of those Regular Army stares. “Do you understand, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

Around them in the darkness were all these moonlike eyes. Some of the nurses were crying and more than one enlisted man walked away rigidly in a state of shocked silence. B.J. held Hawk tighter. He was limp enough to go wherever you moved him but his breath was even and ponderous against B.J.’s chest.

“How much choral hydrate did you give him,” B.J. asked Potter. “How long do we have until he comes around?”

“There’s no chloral hydrate left,” Potter said. For the first time in B.J.’s memory he actually looked old. “They’re having us spend down the all the old stock before the ceasefire. That was morphine, son.”

“Oh.”

“We better get him someplace we can keep an eye on his breathing. Let me help you.”

They got Hawkeye between them, clumsily owing to the differences in their heights. He was not particularly heavy and the toes of his boots dragged on the ground. “Swamp?” B.J. asked. “Post-op?”

“No, bring him to my tent,” Potter said. “Let him sleep in a real bed for a while.”

Klinger went off to the office to apply some messy whitewash, Kellye and Igor corralled the nurses and enlisted men to fetch all the flashlights that could be found and salvage what they could from the O Club, and Charles and Margaret tailed B.J. and Potter as they half-carried, half-dragged Hawkeye across the compound to the Colonel’s tent. He almost couldn’t bear that Hawkeye was unconscious and wouldn't remember this physical actualization of how much they all loved him. Charles pulled the blankets back and fluffed the pillows and Potter and B.J. put Hawkeye in the bed and Margaret took his boots and jacket and belt and dogtags off and disappeared all the blood and cleaned the wound at his forehead and closed it with two butterfly bandages.

“What happens now,” Charles said. For all the natural archness to his voice he sounded quiet and subdued.

“Sidney will tell us,” Potter told them all, but he sounded remarkably unsure. “They’ll probably take him to the hospital.”

“This _is_ a hospital,” Charles enunciated.

“You know what he means, Charles,” B.J. managed.

Potter ignored them both. He was watching Hawkeye breathe. He must have been dreaming because his eyes were moving rapidly under the thin purplish lids. “Sidney will want to send him back here as soon as he… as he can.”

“What if he can’t,” said Margaret in a small voice. She was sitting on the end of the bed, holding Hawk’s limp hand.

“We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it,” Potter said gruffly. “We all need sleep. We’ll make it a rota and revise if any wounded come in. Major Houlihan, you’ll take first shift?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll go next,” B.J. said. “I’ll relieve you at midnight, Margaret.”

“Then me,” Colonel Potter said. “Winchester, you took over his patient today — relieve me at zero eight-hundred, if Sidney’s attache isn’t here by then.”

“Of course, sir.”

They parted ways. B.J. went back to the Swamp and didn’t sleep, listening to Charles toss and turn. The moon shifted across the sky. Planes, crickets, shells far away. He thought about the beach. Underwater all he could hear was his own heartbeat.

At midnight, back in the Colonel’s tent, Margaret hadn't moved from her perch by Hawk’s feet. She startled at the sound of B.J. in the door. “He asked for you,” she said.

“Is he awake?”

“I don’t know, not really. His vitals are okay.”

B.J. brought the Colonel’s desk chair over beside the bed. “Thanks, Margaret,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

“As if I could.”

“I know. I couldn’t. I don’t think Charles either — you can just stay if you want.”

Margaret shook her head. “I should be with my nurses,” she said, getting up, smoothing her rumpled fatigues. “Just shout if you need me.”

“I will. Thanks, Margaret.”

“Don’t thank me.” She grabbed B.J.’s shoulders, but then she just embraced him, standing on tiptoe. He felt her steadying breath move her entire body and realized she was trying not to cry. “I need to,” she said into his neck. “Just as you do, I need to.”

She pulled back, passing the back of her hand under her eye. Then she was gone.

B.J. sat in the Colonel’s chair. For a long time, he watched Hawk’s chest rise and fall. He wasn't dreaming anymore, because his eyelids and forehead were smooth and still, but sometimes his left hand, which was open at his side because Margaret had been holding it, twitched, just a fragile movement of the fingers toward the palm. B.J. knew there was little to no danger of overdose at this point, but he busied himself every half hour or so taking Hawkeye’s pulse and estimating his temperature with the back of his hand at Hawk’s forehead, because if he just sat there he knew he was going to lose his mind, and he couldn't hold Hawk’s hand — he wasn’t Margaret (he wasn't a nurse, he wasn't a woman, there wasn’t going to be a good enough explanation for it, if anyone else came in) — but if he just stood there, he felt like his hands were going to shrivel off. Time dragged immeasurably. B.J. paced. Sometimes Hawkeye would say some garbled nonsense or else a crystal-clear mystery phrase like “Scrambled eggs.” Once, horribly, “I didn’t mean to, dad.”

At last — maybe it was about three AM — B.J. was staring at the first page of one of Colonel Potter’s Zane Grey westerns, _Wanderer of the Wasteland_ , when he heard the saddest little peep go, “Beej.”

He practically threw the book on the floor in his haste to reach for Hawkeye’s clammy hand in the wool blankets. “Hawk,” he said. “I’m here.”

“You're here.”

“I am.”

“Why do I feel so good,” Hawk asked him. He was blinking like kittens or something did when they were just born, trying to clear the protective blinding film from their little eyes.

“All we had to knock you out was morphine.”

His eyes moved slowly over B.J.’s face. He looked very young and tired and lost. “Bastard,” he said.

“Well, the alternative was chloroforming you, which nobody wanted to do…” There wasa terrible emptiness where Hawk would — should — have laughed. “You really feel alright?”

Hawk nodded meditatively. “When I dream about you…” He looked around the dismal little room as though there were beautiful things in the air. Garlands and wreaths of flowers and puffy little clouds and birds singing — “making love to me on a bed of roses…”

B.J. laughed. Then he realized it wasn’t funny. His tongue felt numb. “What?”

“What?”

“You were saying — ”

“What was I saying,” Hawk slurred.

“Nevermind.”

“It was all the — I forget to remember and I remember to forget and I can’t remember what I forget but I know there are things I should remember because I don’t deserve to forget them?”

“No. You got all that out of your system a few hours ago.”

“I was saying something — something secret, wasn’t I?”

“Maybe.”

“Damn. Did I tell you how I love you?”

Later he could not exactly summon a metaphor for what this felt like. A stone arrived inside his body. He was desperately afraid. He didn’t know why, then — he wouldn’t for a long time. “Hawk,” he tried.

“Well, I suppose it’s out now. It isn’t really a secret, is it?”

B.J. wondered if this was a dream. Maybe, for Hawkeye, it was.

“Well I love you,” Hawkeye said again. “You were made to be loved and I love you. Damn. Isn’t it just like the universe to get me with such an easy trick.”

_I wish you’d feel every cut you ever made_ , B.J. remembered. “Isn’t it just like you to delay the punchline,” he said.

Hawk laughed the kind of brittle laugh of a dying person. He patted the back of B.J.’s hand. “You don't have to humor me,” he said. “Please don’t. Just have the decency not to fucking humor me.”

“I wouldn’t,” B.J. told him.

“You would without knowing it.” Hawkeye closed his eyes. “That’s why you’re perfect and also the worst.”

B.J. laughed, but it hurt. “That goes double for you, silly,” he said. He blinked and whatever mist was in his eyes cleared enough to see again the painterly tableau of golden light and shadow in the darkness. He steeled himself. He didn't feel particularly brave, but later he supposed this might've been the bravest thing he'd done in the whole damn war. He recalled that at first he’d thought he wasn't nearly as brave as Hawk, but then he understood that the brave things Hawk did were usually incredibly stupid. “I want to tell you something,” he went on, “and I want you to believe it.”

“Hm,” Hawk said, cracking an eye.

“Do you promise you’ll believe it?”

He nodded once, almost tersely. If he weren't so high he would've done a better job hiding the ghost of hope on his drawn and ravaged face.

“You are incredibly dear to me,” B.J. told him. “I don’t know if I have a word for it. You held me up while I was drowning. I won’t ever forget you.”

Hawk studied him. The expression on his face was illegible and excruciating. B.J. felt like his heart was going to leap out of his body and throw itself over the nearest cliff. “It’s alright,” Hawk said, weakly, turning his face away. “I know you're leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Everybody does.”

“I’m not leaving yet,” B.J. said. “I’m right here. But you need to sleep.”

“Don’t feel bad,”Hawkeye said. “Promise me you won't feel bad.”

“I won’t,” B.J. lied. “Sleep. I’ll be right here.”

It took him a little while, but he did. His face softened out again. B.J. let go his hand and folded his own in his lap so tightly that it hurt. Something, somewhere, indistinctly ached. He couldn’t name the organ it belonged to. It was just general. It went away in a couple days and he didn't think about it again for many years.

Potter came in as scheduled precisely at zero four-hundred, quietly in the swinging door. He too looked unslept. “How’s our patient.”

“In and out,” B.J. told him, voice hoarse for some reason. He would have said something like, he told me he loves me, were he not sure that Potter already knew that, in his own way. “Vitals are stable. He’s pretty calm when he’s awake.” 

Potter rested his hand gently on B.J.’s shoulder. “You’re very good to him, son.”

“We all would’ve gone crazy long ago without him,” B.J. said. “It was like he soaked it up for all of us. Well, he finally got the toxic dose.”

“Sidney will sort him out,” Potter said. His tone suggested he was trying to convince himself. It was reflected in his smile, which was a little weak and wobbly. “You should get off to bed, B.J.”

“I can stay, sir.”

“Nonsense, Hunnicutt, we agreed on the rota, and you’re no good to anyone asleep on your feet!”

Hawkeye stirred. B.J. met the Colonel’s eyes with a finger over his lips. “I’m due in post-op in an hour anyway,” he whispered. “I’m not about to get any sleep. If you can take over for me in there — it’s just — I’d rather not leave him.”

The Colonel looked between them and nodded solemnly. Then he squeezed B.J.’s shoulder again. “I’ll bring you a cup of coffee,” he said.

“Cream and two sugars?”

“Ha,” Potter said, “you’ll be lucky if it’s liquid.” But when he came back, he also brought two remarkably fluffy pancakes, still warm, wrapped in a cloth napkin, greasy with margarine.

B.J. sat vigil at Hawkeye’s bedside like a penitent or otherwise a worried mother until the attache Sidney had sent down from the evac hospital showed up around 7:30. He watched the dawn blow into the window above the bed first in deep blue pockets and then in the ghost of light that touched the eastern horizon and drowned the strange stars one by one.

Since the minute he'd gotten here, despite the army’s best efforts, he’d rarely had any idea what to do. This whole war had been a crash course in flying by the seat of one’s pants. When he really needed answers — when it was something important, when it was life and death — he looked to Hawkeye. And if all Hawkeye gave him was a nod, or a wink, or a flash of the deep sinking expression in his eye that meant there was nothing anybody could do, that was enough. That had to be enough.

He supposed that was why he kept trying, even when it was very hard, even when he thought it might send him to an early grave, even when he thought he might burst with rage; he kept trying for years and years. He didn't know why, exactly; it wasn't like Hawk had asked him to. In the end he figured that Hawkeye had tried very hard every day and every night for three years to keep them all sane and alive, and that it was high time he got his just desserts, even if he didn’t want them.

\--

May 6, 1966

Hawkeye,

It’s a beautiful day in California and I am sitting on my porch writing to you. You’re probably thinking something like, it’s always a beautiful day in California! Well, we had fog all last weekend so thick you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, and last fall, we had enough smoke you could hardly see the sun for a week. But when it’s a beautiful day it is a beautiful day. A kind of beautiful day from a picture book. If I could paint watercolors, I’ll send you one, but it would take me at least three palettes worth of blue. Until then, I think you might just have to believe me. 

Similarly, when I say I was happy to talk to you in March, that’s not the half of it. I was on a cloud. I felt happier than the proverbial clam. You also might just have to believe me about how badly I wanted or needed that, I mean to speak to you, and for how long. I only wish I got to really tell you how much I’ve missed you. The problem is I don’t know if I could articulate that if I tried. You were always better with words, except when it comes to writing to me since 1953 (cough cough). 

Since I got home from Korea, for plenty of reasons I hope I have time to tell you about someday, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of the way we live in America is just a made-up story. When you imagine you’re an alien looking down on the world, what can you see? Over there, I think I got pretty deep into the story that I invented — which isn’t so much a story that I invented, but a story that I decided I needed to live when I was very young. I don’t think anyone could have made you fit that story. I think I envied you for that. You had your own that worked for you for a while, but neither of ours was enough in the end. That’s what’s funny. I don’t know if anyone’s is strong enough to survive what we survived. When people ask me about Korea, I say war has a way of chipping away. But that’s enough about that. I bet I could put Tolstoy to shame on the subject, but I’d honestly prefer to bleed out. 

Anyway, that’s why I’ve been at all the anti-war marches here in the Bay. Both reasons, I guess. At first I tried to talk to some of the counter-protestors. Peg and Erin had to haul me out of there by the scruff of my neck before I started a fight. I was telling these guys, though they’re not, surprisingly, uniformly guys, that if they’d ever been to war they would be standing on our side right now. They didn’t seem to believe me. Some of them even laughed. I’d say that’s one hell of a story to have convinced yourself to believe, but I’m sure they wouldn’t understand. They really think they could get by living every day in blood-wet boots. I’d say we send all of them to Vietnam to test it out, but I wouldn’t wish that on the Vietnamese. I’d say we send all of them to the moon, but I wouldn’t wish that on the extraterrestrials. 

We are all well here, aside from the existential angst. Erin is a second year in high school. She just won an award for her science fair project on reflexes. Peg is the #3 realtor in the county for the second year running. (She tells me to tell you she thinks the top two are paying off the judges.) We got a new record player and have mostly been listening to the Kinks and the Beach Boys. I’m just a general surgeon down at Oakland General, but that’s all I ever really wanted. Or nearly all. 

I miss you — please write. Or call. Or fly out to SFO. I think I still owe you a ride home from the airport. 

Your friend, 

B.J. 

\--

July 15, 1966

[ Scrawled in huge capitals on a postcard from Yosemite ]

Hawk,

You promised!

B.J.

\--

August 2, 1966

B.J.,

You’re right. I’m sorry. I did promise, didn't I? The thing is, the day I got your first letter, I stayed up all night writing you back, and I went through almost a whole notebook, writing one sentence and then throwing the whole page out. Did I ever tell you about the time that I wrote my will at Battalion Aid, and I couldn't think of what to leave you? I was hours wracking my brain… even though, in a place like that, I know you remember, it only ever feels like about one sixth of your brain is turned on at any given time. The rest of it is just a screaming static fog — like what you see between channels on the TV. And if you go poking at it, it starts hissing at you for trying to get it killed. Anyway, I didn't die so it’s all a moot point. But that's what it felt like. Except I couldn't distract or delay myself thinking of silly things to leave to everyone else. So I watched the moon on the water and listened to my dad snoring. In fact, that’s how I started the draft that got the furthest.

So in honor of that, my dad is on the porch listening to the college radio, and the moon is on the water. You would like Maine very much. In the summer, some of the other islands and beaches around here are full of tourists, but there are only a handful that come all the way out here. When you wake up in the morning and the wind moves the curtains and you can hear the waves and the fog bells… When I first got home, I slept for a week, and it felt like I was waking up into another dream. I guess that was why I never wanted to get out of bed.

It was a hard time. I’ll tell you in person because it feels funny in a letter. It’s not an excuse. I still have every letter and telegram and postcard that you ever sent me. I read them over and over and I have a couple of them memorized. I can’t (perhaps obviously as I never wrote back) tell you how much they meant to me. I love to hear about your family. I always did. I love the light that they give you. I’m sure you’ve already given Erin enough congratulations on the science fair award but give her another one from me. Do you think she’ll want to be a doctor? She would be carrying on quite the torch. She sounds like a wonderful girl, but of course she is, she’s your daughter! She was a wonderful girl when she knew three words.

I was always so glad that you had them. I only had you! And I suppose the promise of coming home to my father's lobster salad. It was enough to get me through in one-ish piece. I think I understand what you say about the stories that we tell ourselves. Remember the last night, when Potter asked us what we were going to do when we got home? I couldn’t think of anything. I knew I was lying when I said what I said. My head just went totally blank. I think trying to conceive of “after” and “goodbye” and all of it didn’t exactly mesh with all my meticulously constructed coping mechanisms, especially after the Incident. That’s what Sidney would say, at least, but overall it didn’t bode too well, I suppose. The only thing I meant was that I never wanted to leave the state of Maine again. But, lately, I’ve been thinking about all the fun things about the 1950s that everybody always talks about, which I missed while we were “fighting for democracy” or falling down drunk (or both). Think about it, Beej. A sock hop? Necking at the drive-in? Come to think of it, I also missed a lot of these things because of medical school (read: necking in the supply closets).

About the only thing that really makes me curious is Route 66. I know: maybe I ought to cancel my subscription to _Arizona Highways_. Maybe I should have had more than enough of tooling around the mountains in an open-air convertible, feeling the wind and shell fragments in my hair, etc. Maybe I should trust the instinct of my thirty-three year old self when he said he was never going to leave the state. But think about it, Beej: kitschy motels, tourist traps, hamburgers and milkshakes… the neon desert… the “purple mountains majesty” we are always hearing about… Plus, my boss and father alike are practically begging me to take a vacation. This makes me concerned that they're trying to get rid of me. But if that's true, I might as well enjoy it. And if I might as well enjoy it, then I might as well ask you to come with me. That way I know I’ll enjoy it.

I have to admit, I have no idea why you still have time for me. But then again, I barely understood why you ever had any time for me at all, besides the obvious. I think somehow I need to make myself believe you’re right and I’m wrong. Well, you know how hard that is for me. But I am trying. It can’t be any harder than quitting drinking. Right? I guess you don’t know. I guess I can only tell you if it works. And I guess you’ll have to believe me. Good luck. Ha ha.

I suppose what I'm trying to ask you is, can you meet me in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the end of September? My dad has an old buddy who can rent us a 1955 Chevy Bel Air. I will bring my poodle skirt. If you would wear a leather jacket, it would make me very happy.

Yours Affectionately,

Your Friend,

Hawkeye

\---

\--

-


	2. August 1969

Hawkeye had gotten wind of a music festival happening in upstate New York. “It's probably gonna be some rinky-dink thing,” he said on the phone, “but they say Hendrix is playing.”

B.J. didn't know, yet, who Jimi Hendrix was. He did know that every minute he and Hawkeye were on separate coasts was like a corkscrew being cranked further into his chest cavity. The worst thing was that he knew Hawkeye felt like this too, but he thought he deserved it. B.J. knew he didn’t, most of the time. It had been particularly more challenging since they had celebrated their most recent mid-continent meetup in January of that year in Colorado, ostensibly for skiing, except they had spent half of one day on the slopes at Arapahoe Basin and the rest of the time jouncing the lower bunk bed in their room in the chalet and bewilderedly, disheveledly emerging for meals. Since then, they had exchanged sporadic, infuriatingly chaste postcards. Sometimes B.J. woke up in the middle of the night feeling like he was on fire. He was altogether too old to be having a kind of sexual awakening, as Peg did not hesitate to remind him every time she caught him staring blankly at the turned-off television or burning a hole in the back of one of his dress shirts with the iron, et cetera.

It was a foregone conclusion that he would come out from California. Hawkeye was of the opinion that they should make the approach from the north to avoid traffic and cut down on driving time. As such, B.J. agreed to meet him at Logan Airport in Boston in the early evening on Thursday, August 14; they would get a motel room and then get an early start Friday morning to drive across Massachusetts and south through New York into the Catskills. B.J. packed a bag the minute he got off the phone. He read a newspaper article about the festival, which opined that it was sure to be a decadent shitshow. That just made him even more excited.

On the plane, he thought about Colorado, as much he dared to in a public place. He had not exactly been surprised by what Hawkeye wanted. There had been some colorful letters exchanged after the previous meetup, in Chicago in August of '68, when, after having been tear-gassed and nearly trampled to death at the protests in Grant Park, they had walked in brisk shell-shocked silence back to their hotel room, where they didn’t even make it to the bed. That might have been passed off as an act of life-affirming desperation. In Colorado, it felt nearly as urgent, though they had a lot more time. He had been surprised by the passion with which Hawkeye wanted him, and everything that entailed, which he did not think he had ever encountered before in anyone with regard to anything. He figured they had been both been waiting a long time, but Hawkeye had been waiting longer. It did make B.J. feel like some kind of golden California sex god, which was a rare sensation these days now that his hair was mostly gray and he couldn’t balance on a surfboard anymore. In their objectively hilarious Alpine-themed love nest complete with tasteful watercolors of Swiss milkmaids and dark wood paneling which swallowed all the light thrown at it, even the blinding reflection off the snow outside, it felt like anything was safe to say, or even think, which was probably why they hardly said anything, except B.J. kept telling Hawk to look at him and Hawk kept telling B.J. it was alright and he needed more and he felt so good and he wanted B.J.’s hands everywhere on his entire body at once and both of them repeatedly profaned the names of various gods. And then they just lay there together breathing, and while he was falling asleep he could feel Hawkeye looking at him as though he was extremely miraculous, and he understood that there was something important they'd have to talk about in the morning. But then he would wake up with his cock in Hawk’s mouth, and that was out the window.

All that seemed so far away now as to be impossible, as though maybe it had been a very long and very wet dream, even though Hawk was wearing the same red and blue and yellow flannel over his t-shirt and overalls when he met B.J. at Logan Airport, which was certainly intentional. They shook hands at the gate — this was murderous, an act of vicious premeditated murder committed by all the puritanical squares on earth —and then they walked together to Hawkeye’s red Volvo, which he described all the time in his letters and on the phone but which B.J. had never seen. “It's really not that bad,” he said, trying to mentally digest all twenty bumper stickers, some of which ( _You Just Got Passed By A Grandma_ ) were clearly either hand-me-downs from previous owners or Hawkeye’s idea of endearing kitsch. Or both.

“Wait until you ride in it,” Hawkeye said.

Was this innuendo? God damn. Who knew? B.J.’s brain certainly drew up some pretty pictures.

In the car they each checked every single window for passersby before they turned to each other and touched lips chastely. “I missed you,” B.J. said.

He didn't think he had seen in years this many feelings at once circling like bloodthirsty sharks in the waters of Hawk’s eyes. “I missed you too,” he said.

B.J. greeted the vaguely nonsensical dread which washed its frigid rogue wave through his entire body as an old friend. It hadn’t visited for a while but it always came back around bearing gifts. Hawk put the car in drive and got lost three times in the North End trying to find Route 90. Maybe he was nervous. But why would he be nervous? He hadn’t sounded nervous on the phone. He hadn't sounded _anything_ on the phone… As soon as they found the highway, the bat-out-of-hell motorist B.J. recognized showed up again with a vengeance, and then there were bigger things to worry about.

It had gotten dark by the time they reached a city that B.J. pronounced as “war-chester” until this threatened to start a fight. They settled for a motel right off the highway in which they would probably be the only residents not actively committing adultery. “Say it with me,” Hawk said while they waited at the desk for the receptionist. “Wusta.”

B.J. was conscious that they had both, intentionally or not, angled their bodies away from each other in order to attempt to perform a kind of laconic and possibly overwrought straightness. Just two guys on a fishing trip. Just some buddies visiting for business. He shook his head. “It’s spelled like War-chester. Your version straight up ignores about half the letters in the name.”

“They smush together into the very Massachusetts vowel sound _uhh_ ,” Hawk said. "You should be thanking me, because I could’ve taken you to Scituate.”

“What?”

“Scituate,” Hawk enunciated.

“Are you saying a word?”

With room keys secured from the receptionist, they put their bags down in the room and went to the drive-in next door for burgers. Hawkeye got a vanilla ice cream cone for dessert, which he managed to eat with so much tongue that B.J. wholly expected to be joined in the shower as he endeavored to rinse the stale airplane smell out of his pores and do something about his stubborn half-erection. Instead he took possibly the longest, coldest, loneliest shower he’d had since Korea and came out wet and shivering to find Hawk lying barefoot on the window-facing door, watching _Gunsmoke._

\--

[ Hawkeye paced for an hour in the Tulsa airport feeling like an irredeemable fool, and then he waited at the edge of the gate for the plane from San Francisco, staring longingly at the airport bar. At last the plane nosed up toward the window and Hawkeye suddenly felt he understood what it would be like to be completely drained of blood. B.J. was just going to come up the jet bridge and find a kind of deflated bag on the floor. Except he appeared in the door and angels started singing. They hugged for a long time, clinging to each other and everything. People were probably looking, but they could hardly be bothered to care. This was one of those circumstances where it was socially acceptable for men to touch each other and they had both apparently made up their separate minds to test the limits of that allowance. They hugged for so long that Hawkeye felt cold when they pulled apart. “Hey,” he said, taking things in: B.J.’s long hair, fresh shave, civvies. “You wore a leather jacket.”

“Yeah,” said B.J. dryly, wiping his eyes. “I was led to believe you'd be in a poodle skirt.”

“Not this early in the afternoon!”

He had been very worried that it was going to be awkward. It did take a minute to go stumbling back into its old rhythm. Like an engine turning over. They drove into the dying sun. They pulled off the road onto ranch land and set up the old Pierce family tent (unused in Hawkeye’s memory since the last canoe trip in the Allagash before his mother’s diagnosis) in a stand of cottonwoods. Smoked a doobie. Put the car on just to hear the radio, which out here mostly played AM evangelists preaching about how Satan was real. Laughed hysterically in the firelight. In a room this big — the size of the high and dusty plains — the blushing pink elephant that was Hawkeye’s thirteen-year-old love confession was like a blot at the horizon. Still, he couldn’t sleep, because there was a cottonwood root digging into his back and because he figured that if he were B.J., he wouldn’t be able to sleep wondering if was still true. If it still held. If it was safe to close one’s eyes in the company of such a person on such a hot night that they were lying in t-shirts and skivvies on top of their sleeping bags. A hand’s breath between them. B.J.’s sleepy breathing still had this little wheeze. And the moon was so bright Hawkeye could see it through the rain fly.

“Stop thinking, Hawk,” B.J. said. ]

In September 1966 they spent a week together in the desert without killing each other and B.J. decided he was going to dare to hope that things could be alright, because it was more plausible than the alternative and better than the lingering uncertainty. In November 1967, Peg insisted that they have Hawkeye out to Mill Valley for Thanksgiving, because it was going to be his first one without his father and she hated the thought that he would be alone. So did B.J., but he hadn't said anything about it to Peg yet when she proposed the idea. Melinda came by too, and they all listened to the jazz station on the radio and laughed for hours and ate everything in sight and even let Erin have some wine, and then Melinda helped Erin and B.J. with the dishes while Peg asked Hawkeye to join her on the porch for a clove cigarette. Peg wouldn’t tell B.J. what she’d said to him, but it was evidently something consequential, because in March ’68 they were at a medical conference in Dallas and on the last night B.J. walked Hawkeye back to his hotel room and Hawk grabbed his hand on the threshold as he was turning to go. “Does your hand still bother you,” he asked. He looked and sounded like it physically pained him to have levied such an obvious lie, but also like it would have hurt worse to tell the truth, and it would have hurt worst of all to let B.J. go. So B.J. pushed him very gently through the door and kissed him in the dark.

It was quite sweet to remember. He did a lot of thinking about this kiss. He remembered the moment he could tell that Hawkeye really believed him. That was the most miraculous thing he thought he’d ever felt.

\--

In the morning, they drove west. In Western Massachusetts, the highway went rolling over the rises. Around each corner the suggestion of a new hill between the trees. August color: deep green against the gray.

It wasn’t worth delineating how it was different than California. It just was. It was the beginning, compared to the end. Erin went to college somewhere around where they stopped for breakfast off the highway in Chicopee, and she was always talking about how close the clouds seemed, and that sometimes, walking in the woods, especially if you were stoned, you could feel the witches looking at you. They hadn’t gone away since old times, she said, they’d just changed. She told B.J. this on the porch the first time they got high together, after dinner, early summer, drinking red wine, watching the dusk change the reception on the television set of suburban reality…

In the diner, they ate greasy hash browns, drank black coffee, and fielded suspicious looks from the Air Force guys stopping by in Class As from nearby Westover AFB. Hawkeye flirted with the waitress, so B.J. flirted with her harder. It was unclear who she had in mind when she left her phone number on the bill.

“She saw me get my wallet out,” B.J. opined as they jogged across the street toward the sloppily-parked Volvo. “It’s obviously for me.”

“Oh, no. She made eye contact with _me_ when she put the check down!”

“It doesn’t matter, really,” B.J. said, buckling his seatbelt with desperation as Hawkeye stepped on the gas pedal as though he were accelerating a Saturn V rocket at Cape Canaveral. “I don’t even know the area code around here.”

“It’s 413,” Hawkeye said. “Is that really all?”

B.J. ignored the latter question, because he was obviously joking. Wasn’t he? “How do you know that?”

“I had a Smith girlfriend once.” The expression of vaguely obscene nostalgia crossed his face, and B.J. braced himself for salacious histrionics. But Hawkeye said, “I’ll hold off on all the details coming to mind, because I know your daughter goes there.”

“Erin goes to Mount Holyoke.”

“Oh, that’s good. That’s a relief! You know what they say, Smith to bed, Holyoke to wed.”

“They say that?”

“They say that in Massachusetts.” Hawkeye merged onto the interstate and took the Volvo supersonic. “She lived in a dorm built in the 1880s,” he recalled. “She had a big print of one of those very nice Renoir nudes. And she had one vinyl record, and it was Mary Lou Williams’ _Zodiac Suite_.”

“What was her sign?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What about her name?”

“Loretta. She was studying art history. She wore those stockings with the black line up the back.” The sound of his voice made B.J. shiver. But, god damn him, Hawkeye just said, “Are you cold?”

“Far from it.”

“Ha. Right.”

Closer to the western edge of the state, there were fewer and fewer exits, and the trees looked old. The radio played anonymous jazz. Hawk passed every car that entered his field of vision and then slammed on the brakes when he thought he saw a cop hiding in one of the pullouts and nearly got them flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. They crossed into New York State and crossed the mighty Hudson River where it was shy and narrow and nestled far below in a deep gorge. They drove south through little towns with funny Dutch names. B.J. thought of something he was going to tell Erin, something different about the northeast: the sun had a different mood, or a different lens. It sharpened the corners and the edges of everything. The light wasn't so much a color as some kind of clarifying solution which had spilled indiscriminately over the world. He sunk deeply into his seat and closed his eyes and let it wash over him, but what he was hoping it might clarify he couldn’t say. When he opened his eyes again he found that Hawk had risked a long look in his direction, but then he looked away again, jerking the steering wheel away from the median.

“I can’t say I’ve ever literally driven anyone to distraction before,” B.J. said.

Hawk gave him one of those non-committal chortles. Damn!

They had exchanged perhaps thirty more words by the time they got off the throughway in Kingston and Hawk asked B.J. to find the atlas in the backseat. “We’re going to a town called Bethel near the corner of Pennsylvania,” he said. “Might be easier to find Monticello and go west a click.”

They navigated through strange places. Opulent resorts advertising Jewish singles weekends and summer vacancies, lawns spilling green, pools spilling blue, long legs golden in pearly deck chairs. Vibrant blue lakes like dropped jewels lined with vacation homes and inns, spotted with floating docks, the ecstatic splashing of elated children. Girls running across the street in tennis skirts, laughing, clutching one another’s waists.

“Where are we?” B.J. asked.

“Catskills,” Hawkeye said. “Heaven for a Jewish single, look.”

They drove past a banner advertising a mixer at a resort near Neversink Lake, where there would be bands and comedians.

“You sure you don't wanna go there?” B.J. asked him.

Hawk’s brow furrowed a little, so that you would never see it unless you were looking for it. But he said, “They’ll never let you in the door, you big goy.”

They passed through the town of Liberty, where they put gas in the car and stopped at a supermarket for an armful of nonperishable necessities. Then Route 55 veered south toward the Pennsylvania border, and at last it hit Route 17B in the town of White Lake, where traffic stopped dead.

By then it was early afternoon, Friday, August 15, 1969. False reports would later surface that the influx of festivalgoers to the so-called Aquarian Exposition was such that the New York State Throughway had been shut down. Traffic was certainly crawling on Route 17 all the way back to Middletown, and once you got off onto one of the rural routes all bets were off. People pulled their cars off onto the shoulders of the highway, and into strange driveways and muddy fields, or otherwise abandoned them in the middle of the road, locking the door and pocketing the keys, as in some kind of apocalyptic migration, and walked miles, lugging tents and guitars and beer and blankets and nothing at all but themselves, to the rickety stage hastily erected on a dairy farm at the edge of town.

\--

[ After the events in Chicago, Hawkeye sent B.J. a copy of the best novel he’d read recently, Joseph Heller’s _Catch-22._ He inscribed inside the front cover his favorite quote from the book:

_Dear B.J.,_

_I yearn for you tragically, B.F. “H.” Pierce, Captain, U.S. Army_

He went about this whole production, going to the bookstore and borrowing a pen from the sales girl and then waiting in the mile-long line at the post office in the summer heat lugging the beat-up old suitcase embossed with his father's monogram, before he even set foot on the ferry back home to Crabapple Cove. Sweaty, bewildered, he spent the whole ride pacing on the top deck, so that Captain Cyr came by after work that evening for coffee and asked if everything was alright. All of his neighbors on Cliff Island had been very nice and only occasionally annoyingly overbearing in their efforts to keep an eye on him after his father had passed away. All Hawkeye needed to say was that he had come from Chicago. Everybody had seen the struggle there on their television screen.

They were sitting on the porch. Captain Cyr had brought a flask of bourbon in the pocket of his canvas work pants and he tried to surreptitiously empty some of it into his coffee mug. “Why’d you go in the first place?”

“Well, me and some old buddies of mine belong to a protest group. Veterans Against the War.” He was sure he’d said this before. “I have the newsletter in the house if you want to see it.” He was particularly sure he’d said this before to Captain Cyr, who had been a Navy quartermaster in the Pacific theater in World War II.

“Maybe another time,” said Captain Cyr. This was what he always said. “All I’m trying to say is, it’s getting dangerous out there.”

Better than Khe Sanh, Hawkeye thought. Bit his lip. Better than Bloody Ridge. Better than Leyte Gulf.

The old captain put his liver-spotted hand on Hawkeye’s shoulder. “Be careful,” he said.

When he left, Hawkeye called B.J. to say he had gotten home safe. It was late and the long-distance charges were racking up quick and there was nothing to say besides what had already been said but for a while they each just listened into one another’s silence from the other side of the continent. ]

In Colorado, after the initial haze faded, B.J. lifted his head from the tangle of limbs and sheets to find the floor of their tiny bunk room positively carpeted with assorted woolen and flannel and fleece layers. The skis and poles themselves had fallen precariously akimbo against the door. There was a stripe of vivid light washing through the slim opening in the curtains, illuminating a wedge of the disaster.

Hawkeye propped his head up against B.J.’s chest. “Looks like a hurricane went through here,” he said.

“I think one did.”

“I think I ripped your sweater,” Hawkeye said regretfully.

Indeed, back from deeply within the gold-drenched fuzziness B.J. dimly remembered the sound of the fabric tearing. “It was already going,” B.J. said. “And I was a willing participant.”

For a while they slept. After all they were old men and they were nearly at eleven thousand feet elevation. There were no dreams — just a kind of stillness. When he woke up again he wasn't entirely certain where he was or that it was real. His breath ruffling Hawk’s hair. He watched the light through the curtains move and change on the floor as the sun slipped over the pass and cast the mountains in cool blue shadow.

When it was nearly dark he got up to piss and coming back from the tiny en-suite toilet managed to step directly on his own ski goggles where they’d landed when he’d practically torn them off his head and thrown them across the room. He yelped like a hurt dog and went jumping around naked clutching the bad foot amidst the piles of layers on the floor.

Behind him he could tell Hawk had woken up out of a good dream because of how sleepily he said, “What’s wrong?”

“Stepped on — goddamn. It’s alright.”

“Come over here.”

B.J. limped in his direction. Hawkeye had sat at the edge of the bed, blankets piled in his lap, and his hair was a mess, and there was a little reddish bite-bruise at the join of his neck and collar that B.J. must have put there, not that he really remembered doing it. “Sit down,” Hawkeye said, yawning. “Let me see it.”

Logically B.J. knew nothing was really wrong, but he did. It was a little awkward in the tiny bed to stretch his legs out and angle the hurt foot into Hawk's lap. His fingers were cool, circling B.J.’s ankle and tracing from his arch back to his heel. “Are you ticklish,” Hawkeye asked him when he flinched.

“No,” B.J. said.

His brow twitched. He could tell that was a lie. But all he said was, “Hmm.”

“Am I alright?”

“You’re all set, legs,” Hawkeye said. But then he leant over and pressed his lips against B.J.’s instep.

He was moved by a strike of love. They reached for one another again in the semidarkness.

\--

Having abandoned Hawkeye’s car in a ditch — “I'm actually kind of hoping it gets towed,” he said — they slogged up hill after hill with arms full of camping gear and supplies and found themselves, at long last, in the late afternoon, at the crest of a wide green bowl that spilled down toward a muddy pond. Already making themselves semi-comfortable in that bowl, strumming acoustics, passing joints, were more people than B.J. had ever seen before in one place in his life. Asking around yielded precisely no answers, so they set up Hawkeye’s bright orange tent at the edge of some trees where a handful of other folks had strung canvas tarps and fairy lights in the branches and miraculously pulled in retrofitted and colorfully decorated Volkswagen camper vans. They found a relatively flat plot, cleared out the acorns and pine litter, and spread a tarp on the ground to keep their sleeping bags and spare clothes from getting wet, but in the end they wouldn’t sleep there a wink.

When he thought back later on his attendance at possibly the most consequential cultural event of the entire extremely consequential decade, B.J. found that, unfortunately but predictably, he couldn’t remember very much of it very clearly. Part of this was no doubt due to the copious weed and the monumentally disturbed sleeping pattern, with the bands starting around five in the evening and going past dawn. Another part of it was no doubt due to the fact that, as was unfortunately customary between B.J. and Hawkeye, they spent a great deal of time preoccupied by a misunderstanding. As misunderstandings went, even as their notoriously ridiculous misunderstandings went, it wasn’t a particularly big one, but it was a kind of silent and festering one, which was arguably worse.

They waded ankle-deep through the mud, watching the sun go down over Richie Havens; huddled together in the midnight rain under Hawkeye's flannel while Ravi Shankar played hypnotic ragas into the moonless darkness; listened to half a million people sing Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” along with Joan Baez; wondered what was wrong and why they couldn't seem to speak and why the other couldn't seem to speak and how it could feel so strange when they knew it was right and how it could feel so stilted and difficult after last time they had seen one another when they had shared everything… They slept amidst a pile of hippies on the steaming ground in the relentless drizzle, waking to find they were holding each other and drifting apart. They wandered, seeking food and water, accepting strange and sloppily-rolled joints in lieu of either, watching the clouds, wading barefoot into the muddy pond behind the stage; they watched Santana and Canned Heat and the Grateful Dead, passed out and woke up with a start in the middle of Creedence Clearwater Revival playing “Proud Mary”… In the dead of night, the stars visible overhead occasionally when the clouds pulled apart, just so, like cotton candy, they watched Janis Joplin and her band do “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain”; they danced with five hundred thousand other people dancing and clapping and shouting and cheering enough to shake the foundation of the earth while Sly the Family Stone played “I Want to Take You Higher,” though it was somewhat unclear how anyone, even Sly, could take anybody higher, given the general psychedelic mania; and then the Who played as the sun started bleeding deep blue into the sky above the fields.

The story B.J. told himself when his memory returned to that weekend began on Sunday morning: the Who traipsing off the stage, the bloody-color dawn. Hawkeye, having passed out in the middle of “Pinball Wizard,” was asleep beside him, sprawled on his back in the mud with his flannel over his head. B.J. woke him up with a hand at his shoulder. “Should we find something to eat?”

They wandered through the sodden wasteland strewn with narcoleptics and acid casualties. There had been a few rickety wooden shacks at the top of the bowl the night before, selling astronomically priced hamburgers and hot dogs, but in their place was a burnt-out pit which they observed bewilderedly. “There’s a cucumber in the tent,” Hawkeye said.

“A cucumber?”

“Yeah, I mean there’s other things too, but mostly I remember the cucumber.”

They went walking back that way, stomachs rumbling, and eventually discovered a folding card table upon which some enterprising and kind-hearted person had set up about two hundred dixie cups full to the brim with granola. Hawkeye poured four of the cups into the breast pocket of his overalls and they crept away shoving handfuls of nuts and raisins and toasted oats into their mouths.

“This stuff isn’t bad,” B.J. noted.

Hawkeye nodded. “I think anything would taste good right now,” he said. His voice was hoarse from shouting all night. “I'd eat mess tent food.”

The fog moved over the pond and among the trees like gauze or shifting skirts. Hawk stared his unfocused yearning stare down the hill toward the water, startling a little when B.J. reached into his overalls pocket for a last handful of granola. “What are you thinking about,” B.J. asked him.

“Janis Joplin.”

“Still?”

“Are you thinking about something else?”

“Hm,” B.J. said. “Sly doing ‘Dance to the Music.’”

“Fair.”

“Why Janis?”

Hawk shrugged. “I don't think anybody ever sang about love so well as her.”

B.J. had felt like every vocal inflection of “Ball and Chain” was driving a dull stake more deeply into his heart. Beside him, Hawk had been raptly still, except when the way Janis forced her voice into a scream seemed to send a long chill up his spine. Every blues song was about the same thing for a reason: there was one thing more likely than any other to give you the blues. But Janis's singing — the anguish in her voice, the scraping in her throat — gave long-overdue speech to the rotting bruise.

“Hawk,” B.J. dared, feeling like he had cut the brakes and started himself speeding downhill toward oblivion, “is something wrong?”

The steely gaze which met his eyes sent a spike of raw foreboding down into B.J.’s gut. “Nothing’s wrong,” Hawkeye said.

“Don’t do that. Can’t you tell me?”

Hawkeye turned into the sunrise. The light on his face was a decaying gold. “I only wonder what we’re doing,” he said, almost absently.

“Do you still think I’m only humoring you?”

“It’s not that,” Hawkeye told him, rubbing the back of his neck. “I only wasn’t sure where we stood after… everything that happened in Colorado.”

B.J. was aghast. “How could you not be sure? You basically held my soul in the palm of your hand.”

“And you mine, but — sex is — some people get the idea that — ”

“You really think that’s all I was after from you?”

“Well, no, but — when you go flouncing out the door, saying, oh Hawk, please write me, I’ll see ya when I see ya?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means that this is fine, this seeing you every six months and having a nice time in a beautiful place and maybe getting railed to oblivion, but I’m too old for it to go on like this very much longer!”

“I seem to remember that _you_ invited _me_ to come with _you_ to this… mud-caked hippie circus.”

“You know me,” Hawkeye said coldly. “I wanted to see Hendrix. And I can make a living off scraps.”

“You ever think about how you have a way of bringing it on yourself?”

He blinked. He was alright at rolling with punches. “All the time,” he said.

B.J. put his hands on his hips. He could feel his heart racing in his throat. “You’re saying it’s not enough,” he surmised.

“It’s not enough,” Hawk agreed. “But I’d rather have not enough than nothing.”

“You know it doesn’t have to be like this. How can I know what you want if you won’t tell me?”

“I tell you what I want! I’m telling you what I want right now!”

“The hell you do. Colorado doesn’t count, apparently. Hawk, I mean it. Can’t you find it in your heart to be vulnerable? Can’t you open up?”

“Haven’t I enough? Can’t you?”

“You first!”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. I went first of all. I went first in July 1953. It’s your turn!”

If there had been a chair in the vicinity, or anywhere on the festival grounds, B.J. would have collapsed into it long-sufferingly. “You know, sometimes you really drive me up the fucking wall.”

“Well, the feeling’s mutual.”

B.J. pinched the bridge of his nose in two fingers. “I’m not fighting with you like this in front of the kids,” he said. “I'm taking a walk.”

“A walk? Where are you gonna go?”

“I have no fucking idea. Back to California maybe.”

Hawkeye’s eyes got big and bright. But he corralled all his omnipresent willingness to fight and said “Fine!”

B.J. could not let this be outdone. “Fine!”

They turned away from each other like rival outlaws in a shootout counting twenty paces for a duel, but after B.J. counted twenty paces, even though he knew he should turn around, even wanted to turn around, he kept walking until his fists unclenched of their own accord.

\--

[ After about six seconds Hawkeye realized this was a bad idea. He turned heel in the dense mud but B.J. had nearly disappeared into the crowd. In his pink shirt and bell bottoms he was only differentiable from the hippie masses in that he was wearing those red suspenders. At least he looked damn good walking away. A troublemaking part of Hawkeye’s brain reminded him that B.J. would certainly leave him here and they would certainly never see each other again. But then the rational part of his brain jumped in and said, “It’s your goddamn car!”

He wandered back away from the stage, toward the edge of the trees. The dawn had still not quite gotten underneath into the shadow. In the mud and pine litter, kids slept holding each other, wrapped in blankets and coats, girls’ heads on boys’ chests, boys’ heads in girls’ laps, occasional configurations suggesting same-gender love or at least some stoned semiplatonic touchiness, a little stoned laughter, quiet dreams.

There was something almost post-apocalyptic about it: all these people washed up on the shore of the morning, disheveled, high, hardly knowing where they were coming from or where they were going. This — Woodstock, the sixties — was some kind of stopover between birth iterations of the world. It was the sloppy struggling into the next phase. At least, one could only hope so. He wandered for a while, thinking, observing. The light seeped in through the heavy summer treecover showing dappled patterns in the mud. There were so many people happy together and laughing…

Of course this was what had been going to happen from the beginning. This was probably what had been going to happen since Charles had come to get him in the sitting room of the Winchester estate on Beacon Hill and said, Phone for you, _Pehhhhce_. There was some kind of terrible decay happening inside him that touched other people and degraded them too. It got worse the closer that you were, like any other radioactive thing. It was why nobody ever liked him very much or for very long. It was why Billy had pushed him in the channel off Jewell Island in 1933. It was why Trapper had left without leaving a note. It was why B.J. had left without leaving a note! They all had limits. Who could blame them, at the end of the day? He was resigned to it now, or he would have been if B.J. hadn’t come back into his life, squeezing his perfect body through the crack in the door…

He wandered aimlessly for a long time, crossing at the top of the great bowl, catching snippets of conversations, laughter and tears, snores, shouts, kisses… finally he made it to the north end of the field, and thought he might try to sleep for a few minutes under one of the grand old trees, but, instead, for some possibly-fated reason, his eyes met a young woman’s eyes through the morning light and the heavy leaf loam. A smile surfaced from her face. “Hey, man,” she said.

Much later he would wonder how this whole thing could not have been obvious for what it was from the beginning. The girl was sitting with her legs meditatively crossed under her long floral skirt, behind a long, flat rock on which she had set up a few gas station glasses halfway full of orangey liquid. She lifted her right hand aloft in a peace sign, shimmering her bangles. “Wanna turn on,” she asked.

“What’s that mean?”

“Have a drink,” she said, offering one of the glasses aloft.

“Is there booze in it?”

“Not a drop.”

He took it. Drank it. It tasted fine. Lemonade — a little bitter. “Thanks,” he said, sitting down next to her.

“What’d you think it meant,” she asked.

“What?”

“You don't know what it means to turn on?”

“I’m a little old for you, is what I was thinking,” he said. “And spoken for. I think.”

“You think?”

"Somebody went walking away from me about — ” He checked his wrist, but there was no watch — “half an hour ago, I guess.”

The girl’s face twisted sympathetically. She put two fingers in the front pocket of her shirt and pinched out a fresh joint. “Share with me?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“I got walked away from last year,” said the girl, sparking the joint. “It was for the best, but it fucked with my energy.”

“What happened?”

“We had ideological differences,” she said. “I want nothing less than total liberation. He was all for it, so I thought, until I let him know that I also wanted total liberation from doing his dishes.”

“Huh,” Hawkeye said. How to tell her, I think I have the exact opposite problem? In the absence of oppressive gender dynamics, he thought he wanted hardly anything more than to do his lover’s dishes.

The girl exhaled a grey-white cloud and passed him the joint. Where the hell were these kids getting their pot? It tasted sticky-sweet, like inhaling ginger and pine. He coughed a little smoke out his nose and handed the roach back to her, but she pressed his hand back toward him. “Take a deep breath,” she said. “We’re cleaning it all out. We’re purging all the old energy.”

He didn't know exactly what she meant when she talked about energy, but it was worth a try. He took another drag and felt the sweet burn in his lungs he understood that as a doctor he should probably hate. Then she let him hand the joint over. “Now you tell me what happened,” she said.

“I don’t know. Had a bit of a tiff. A spat. Maybe the British would say a row.”

“About what?”

He felt the warm but challenging blanket of cannabis settle over his brain and start connecting all the usually-mismatched synapses. “Unfortunately we have very different fears,” he said, realizing it as he was saying it.

“Do you love each other?”

He hated this question, because it was irrelevant. “Yes,” he said, “of course.” He knew it all the time. He had known it in Korea.

“Then what else is there to fear?”

Hawkeye laughed. The girl offered him the joint again and somehow he found the wherewithal to refuse. “I wish it was that easy,” he said.

“But it is that easy.”

The old man brain started shaking its get-off-my-lawn fist and shouting, this is why they call you kids naive! “I don't know.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you think love is enough? Why wouldn't love be enough?”

“Damned if I know. Which I guess is always what I say when — when I do know but the knowing is contained in a part of my head that — if I so much as touch it I think it’ll explode. I just never go back there and it’s all collecting dust. You know?”

“No,” said the girl, leaning back on the heels of her hands. “By definition I can't know another person’s mind. I can’t even be certain that any other person has consciousness same as me. All of reality could be a dream.”

“You really think that’s true?”

“You don’t?”

“Sometimes I hoped… anyway, what’s happening?”

The girl smiled a little. “Something’s happening?”

“Someone opened a window in the back of my eye.”

“That’s what I meant by _turn on_ , man,” she said. “What do you see?”

Either this was the best weed ever or there was something else at play that he had not previously unaccounted for. He saw basically nothing and everything happening at the same time. Everything was happening the same as how things always happened but their mechanicals were very clear. The wind caressed the spine of every leaf on every tree with a different finger and started the whole great and terrible being shivering. That tree maybe being old enough to have been here since before white people set foot on this continent, every day telling the same story over and over and over again: the story of being touched and being moved and being moved by a touch and being touched by a move: life itself being a cycle of such narratives… He strove toward the back of his mind for whatever knowledge about photosynthesis remained from undergraduate biology, but then he heard music. Music was the heart of life which made everything go. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Listen, man — ”

“I'm being called,” he told the girl, gesturing toward the stage. “Can't you hear? I’m being summoned.”

It was stretching for him across the long bright dawn bowl. The morning spreading out from the east. The music reached inside his body through his eyes and fingertips and wrapped a gentle tugging hand around his heart.

“I have to go,” he told the girl, except he was already walking away. “I have to go, I’m sorry…”

He made his way through the mud and sun, stepping on people by accident, wiping out more than once, except it didn't hurt, and sometimes he was lifted up by hands belonging to faces, and other times he was grabbed and kissed, and he felt like he was being passed aloft overhead like the victor of some bizarre sports competition, and he felt like he was slogging against the sucking tide, and he felt like he was wandering in the jungle, and he felt like he was pushing through the human tide at Grant Park, and he felt like he was underwater swimming desperately toward the surface, and then he looked up and found he was in none of these places doing none of these things but in reality he was standing even with the plywood riser upon which a few bearded men were engineering the sound mix, about fifty yards from the rickety makeshift stage. This close he could see that on that stage was the most beautiful woman in the world, accompanied by a group of men in bizarre cultish dress. She had wild dark hair and she wore a white fringe set. Evaluating the drummer and the bassist with light, morning-bright eyes, she found a rhythm in her band’s primitive beat and started singing: “When the truth is found to be lies…”

So this was the Jefferson Airplane, the psychedelic rock group from San Francisco, and that woman was Grace Slick. It was incredible. It went on for two hours which manifest in Hawkeye's orbital-spinning brain as an entire sophisticated lifetime. The band was seven different people doing for the most part whatever they wanted in rough coordination. Occasionally the drummer would solo for a full minute. Occasionally the guitarists would solo for longer. Each vocalist took turns exhibiting unhinged harmonic wailing. The songs were absurd, jammy prognostications on whatever unseeable thing was coming next: free love revolution, nuclear holocaust, generational psychedelic trip. But wasn’t there a strange beauty in the great uncertainty? What would happen from here? It was going to be nineteen seventy. Thirty years from a new millennium. Could anything happen? As certainly as any bad thing could, so too any good thing could. They were all here because they believed it. Why shouldn’t they believe it? Yes there was the great nothing of a thousand endless deaths ahead of them. Yes the entire world might be toasted in the very next moment as an effect of mutually assured destruction brought about by a handful of men in high towers or deep mineshafts. Yes every politician was a craven spineless bastard who had directly or through negligence brought about the deaths of thousands. Yes the loser might not accept the results of the election and might sic his deluded gun-nut sycophants on the rest of us. But why would you choose to believe any of these things when you could believe that a better world was possible? Not only possible but that it was around the corner at every time everything you did even when you were just in the supermarket or on the ferry or on the subway or in a hospital or at work or in your lover’s arms and all you had to do was open the door —

Time moved and changed. Blue and gray. Could have been the sky anywhere but unmistakably it was the sky here even though he had never been here before so how could he know the sky — ?

The earth was warm. He found himself extremely comforted by the thought that if he lay here long enough sooner or later it would grow up around him and embrace him. Not that he would, but that he could. Underneath him, it was moving. A human lifetime is the blink of an eye. Capitalism is half the length of your littlest fingernail. The existence of our species on this planet doesn’t go halfway down your palm. And yet time is all around us. Time is a gift. Would you throw away a gift?

“What are you thinking about, man,” said a sunshine face which hovered into his field of vision like an unruly zeppelin. It was the girl who had given him the cup of lemonade, hours previous now.

“I’m a surgeon,” Hawkeye told her for some reason. “I’ve seen thousands of people’s insides, and they were all beautiful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, really. Do you get squeamish?”

“No.”

“I’ve known people to faint just talking about this kind of thing.”

The girl shrugged. “I’m a midwife,” she said.

This was totally unsurprising. “You know the mystery,” he told her.

“So do you.”

“No. I just know… the shape of the mystery in the living world.”

“The living world.” Her grin wobbled endearingly. “I think of it as a sort of… fungal existence.”

“How so?”

“We attach ourselves to things and decompose them.”

Hawkeye felt himself doing Charles’s fish mouth gawping thing. “Holy shit,” he managed eventually. 

“Mushrooms are smarter than us, man,” the girl explained as Hawkeye sat up, blinking unnamable colors out of his field of vision. “I think we’d all be better off if we surrendered to our inferiority.”

“How do we do that?”

“We have to listen.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “Psychic death.”

This sounded terrifying. “Psychic death?”

“Or, as my mom used to always say, get the hell over yourself.”

“It’s that simple?”

“No. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

_You know what would be the hardest thing in the world_ , B.J.’s voice said inside Hawkeye’s mind. He was trapped behind a hastily-erected wall of piss-stained post-op mattresses and bedpans, which he was beating at with the heavy circular base of a bent and broken IV stand. _Getting over yourself enough to believe me! I love you, stupid!_

The better world was just around the corner and all you had to do was open the door and let it come rushing through stampeding you over like a herd of elephants, et cetera.

So much as thinking about B.J. made his heart expand. It hurt, but not bad, almost good. All their walking away from each other in all the long years was a funny thing. It was like stretching against a rubber band. The funniest thing was that they only did it because of a story that was happening to other people. Why can’t two people love each other incredibly? All of a sudden, he couldn’t stop laughing.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to find my — you know, whatever,” Hawkeye told her, struggling to his feet.

“Your girlfriend?”

He pictured B.J. vividly in one of those girlfriendy paisley minidresses with a starched white collar and saddle shoes and thought he was going to die of laughter.

“Your wife?”

“Close but no doobie,” Hawkeye said.

“Your husband?”

He wobbled his hand to say, so-so. Kind of. 

“How are you going to find him? There’s half a million people here, they’re saying.”

“I’ll find him. Oh, I’ll find him.”

He could not exactly explain to her that some kind of homing beacon in his chest had switched on. There was a vivid majestic light spilling through a funny metaphysical rip at the back of his neck. He felt connected by synapses to a larger ecosystem of energy, as though humanity were like those stands of aspen trees that were all one enormous being connected by interwoven roots…

“Okay,” said the psychedelic midwife. “Take this. It’ll help.” And she draped a loosely woven crown of daisy flowers — he never knew where exactly they had come from —over his head.

“It’ll help? How will it help?” 

She shrugged. “It’s just flowers,” she said. But her smile said something else. He couldn’t read the secret that was back there yet, but every minute the light showed something new, so that he thought he might understand it soon. ]

\--

For his part, B.J. went to drop acid on purpose. After the psychotomimetic therapy in ’57, he and Peg had tried mushrooms once, on a camping trip in the Redwoods while Melinda was watching Erin. Subsequently, he had considered himself somewhat old hat with psychedelics, which he figured later was probably his first mistake. Second was approaching a cadre of shirtless college dudes passing around an acoustic guitar to ask what kind of drugs they had — he should have waited to run into a cool older girl in fringe who would probably have had mushrooms or higher quality LSD. One of the boys separated a little square of blotter paper from the sheaf in the pocket of his denim vest and put it on the tip of B.J.’s finger. B.J. gave the kid a ten dollar bill from his wallet, stuck the thing on his tongue, tipped an imaginary hat, and walked away. Hence mistakes three and four: getting high while he was still in a rotten mood, and wandering off to find someplace to be alone.

Hence followed several hours of ransacking terror. It was so bad that some kids came over to his suffering place under a half-dead pine tree and offered to take him to Ken Kesey’s “special bus” where apparently a group of sympathetic hippies were talking down people on bad trips and feeding them sugary snacks, but the invocation of the word “bus” put a strike of old rotten regret through him and he adamantly refused, even though later he somewhat regretted this because Kesey was his favorite living novelist. But it wouldn’t have been edifying to meet him or in fact see anyone in such a state of abject disgrace. The rogue wave of cold dread wound up for slap after slap across the face. It started from the good old place: you’re a failure as a father. Classic. Then onto an interesting one, considering how long it had been since the divorce had been finalized: you’re a failure as a husband. That was an oldie but a goodie. Then there was the fresh wound of the new guilt: you’re a failure as a lover to the dearest person in the world. That man is selfless and kind and beautiful in certain lights and loves you and has deep-seated psychological issues. And how are you paying him back for basically hauling you behind him on a sledge through a field of blood for two and a half years? You told him you were going to walk home!

He was tormented by the thought of the notes he didn't leave. He had realized all the scraps of paper were still in his pocket in the Transient Officers’ Club in Guam, waiting for the flight back to Korea.

_Dear Hawk —_

_Hawk —_

_Hawkeye —_

_Dear Hawkeye, I’m so sorry —_

Anyway, that had been the worst he’d felt in his life, drinking bourbon and water for hours, watching the tarmac bleed heat, waiting for the phone to free up so he could call Peg and tell her not to bother coming to the airport, waiting to go back to the Uijeongbu for his judgement, waiting, waiting, waiting — that had been the worst he'd felt in his life until just now, being mentally scaphized by lysergic acid diethylamide under a dying pine tree on the western edge of the Catskills. New York State. The Jefferson Airplane playing in the background. Who would have thought?

It had been hours or perhaps years by the time he fought his way to his feet and went staggering out from the medieval torture chamber of his mind into the somewhat more contemporary torture chamber of the masses. It was a beautiful blue day, sticky humid with a clammy chill, thunderclouds on the far horizon. How did all these beautiful sleepy stoned laughing people not see? The storm was coming to wash everything away. How were they not mourning? Was this some kind of last gasp of devil-may-care decadence before the deluge of Real Life hit everybody over the head and drenched them to the bone? What was outside of this? Nixon, Vietnam, doomsday machines, oil spills? How could they laugh at all?

Now where had he heard that before — ? He didn’t want to remember but he had to because sometimes that memory played over and over again on the edge of sleep but by some impossible stroke of luck his reckless brain sledgehammered through the wall protecting him from it and it poured through his skull like a flood of evil molasses just about the same time that he heard:

“Beej!” Hawkeye shouted.

It took B.J. a minute to recognize him, because he looked twenty years younger and electrified with life. Somebody had draped him in a colorful knit poncho and somebody else had set a chain of daisies as a crown in his damp hair. He came running over comically through the sticky mud with his arms open and he grabbed B.J.’s cheeks in his grubby hands and set about kissing all over his face.

Somewhere B.J. heard some stoned girl go, “Aww.”

“Oh, I love you,” Hawk was saying, between kisses. “Oh, god, I love you. And I love the rain. I love the water. And I love the grass. And I love Grace Slick. And I love you.”

“What did you take,” B.J. asked him.

“I didn’t take anything. Somebody gave me a glass of lemonade. You know, and when I was halfway through it, I saw that it wasn't actually lemonade, you know, it was sunshine. They made it liquid, Beej.”

“They did?”

“Yeah. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, after your face.”

“You drank the whole thing?”

He was too stoned himself to be doing the rough subdivisions of how much LSD Hawkeye had probably taken and how long the trip would last. Still his brain tried. “I did,” Hawk said. “It’s alright, Beej, it's really okay, it got all inside me, it — I can feel all the light, all through me, I’m okay, I promise. There’s — I made some friends, we were playing cards but then the cards were playing us, d’you want to meet them? The kids, or the cards, or — this is what I was doing earlier — we can just lie on the ground and really, I mean really _listen_ to the ground…”

“I’m — Hawk, I’m just going to go back to the tent, you stay. Keep… having fun, I’ll see you when I see you.”

Hawkeye took both his hands. His eyes were basically fractaling out. The love that B.J. felt for him was about the most terrifying thing in the world. Even worse — somehow — was the love that he knew Hawk felt for him. That was basically the substance that constituted the air. It was everywhere around them and B.J. could nearly see it. It was developing like a Polaroid photograph at the rough speed of his awareness of it and he shut his eyes tightly because he knew if he saw it, really saw it, his hair would turn white and he would truly lose his mind forever. “What’s wrong,” Hawk asked him, “are you okay?”

The thought that he would have a bad trip was even worse than the fact that B.J. was currently having a bad trip. “It’s nothing — nothing,” B.J. said, daring to crack an eye. “Just tired. I promise.”

“I’m coming with you.”

Hawk insisted on holding his hand while they went across the field toward their tent at the edge of the woods. “People are looking,” B.J. said.

“Do you know how many people I’ve seen having sex today,” Hawkeye retorted. “It’s probably scandalous to these kids that all we’re doing is holding hands. Besides, you look square as hell, and I look like Jerry Garcia.” 

“You do not look like Jerry Garcia and besides — what about — Hawkeye, we’re two men.”

“Do you know how many men I’ve seen having sex with other men today?”

B.J. sighed. “No. And I don’t particularly want to.”

“I looked away,” Hawkeye said indignantly. “I didn’t participate! They were half my age.”

Back at their tent, their neighbors were futilely attempting to build a campfire with wet wood while passing around the biggest joint B.J. had ever seen. Either he was truly hallucinating, or one of them was a nun. He didn't get a chance to confirm for sure because Hawkeye was herding him into the tent, taking his shoes off, landing a badly-targeted kiss in his half-open eye, and then he disappeared and came back in again in a few minutes with a cup of something. “Lie down,” Hawk said. “Drink this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just water.”

“It’s not from one of the pumps, is it?”

“No. I brought it with us in the car.”

B.J. drank the whole glass and then he lay down. He closed his eyes. There were terrible things doing battle back there, so he opened them again and stared at the orange fabric of the tent. He heard and felt more than saw Hawk lie down beside him and wrap an arm around his chest and scoot as close as he physically could and haul the wool blanket up over them, even though it was not particularly cold. He could feel the point of Hawk’s nose against the back of his neck. And his hand was right against B.J.’s staggering heartbeat.

“Tell me all your bad thoughts,” Hawk said. It wasn’t quite in his doctor voice but it wasn’t far.

“If I tell you my bad thoughts then they’ll be your bad thoughts and then — ” he didn’t exactly know how to say this — “then you’ll get sick.”

“I won’t,” Hawk said. “I’m going to build a wall with them to keep you safe until it’s over.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Everything we say has… a kind of physical manifestation,” Hawkeye said. “It’ll be easy. It’ll be like — d’you remember when we had to sandbag the OR?”

“Don’t bring up the OR,” B.J. said, cringing.

“I’m sorry — I won’t again. But it'll be like that.”

“Hawk,” he admitted, “I’m scared.”

“They can't hurt you because I’m here,” Hawk said. “I'm made of light. I’m here.”

“I hate to break it to you, but you’re just tripping, Hawk,” B.J. said, “you’re off your head.”

He could feel Hawk shrug. “I figured,” he said. “It doesn’t make it any less true. Come on.”

B.J. took a deep breath. He steeled himself. He felt Hawkeye's arm tighten around him like a seatbelt. He felt like Armstrong must have during the countdown on Apollo 11. “I’m worried that none of this will mean anything,” he said. “I’m worried that — something bad will make it so none of the good stuff ever gets heard. I'm worried that only culture will ever change while everything else says the same. I’m worried that this — that it won’t be enough. For us. That it — that we never had — that we can’t — ”

“We love each other,” Hawkeye said.

His own voice sounded very small. “What if it isn't enough?”

“Of course it’s enough.” There was some rustling as Hawk propped himself up on his elbow. “Beej, look at me.”

His hand at B.J.’s chest slipped up against his shoulder and turned him gently onto his back. The love had turned into a knife which stabbed him repeatedly. He almost cried just looking at how the crown of flowers was crooked.

“Of course it's enough,” Hawkeye said indignantly. Of course he did: he was uniquely privy to the heavy undercurrents controlling the universe. “It’s enough. I never dared to believe it before today. But now I know it's enough.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

He pinned B.J.’s hand against the ground by the wrist and kissed him. The kiss tasted like light. He was incredible. How did he do this? He made the knife turn into a kind of ice pick or something and every kiss cracked a further spark of light into the prison until it fell away. B.J. started laughing thinking this was probably the fifteenth version of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” performed so far this weekend but probably the most abstract and interpretive and thus would end up being the most historically important, at least in their own version of history, and he knew that Hawk knew this without his saying it aloud or his own having to ask, so that they were laughing until they couldn’t laugh anymore, but even then they tried.

It wasn't the best sex they ever had. Far from it. Chiefly, Hawkeye’s overalls turned out to be really complicated if you were on drugs, and there was no lube. Hawk said, “Let me go ask somebody,” and then they started laughing hysterically again for another ten minutes. When they got it together enough to keep going on, it took them an embarrassingly long time to get around to the main event, so that they missed Joe Cocker’s entire set carefully cataloging one another’s freckles. Finally B.J. got both hands at Hawk’s waist and he just went still. What a miracle! They climbed, naked, into one another’s laps, too many too-long legs for such a small space, and B.J. got a hand around both of them and Hawk shivered but he didn't look away. From then on it was quick, maybe embarrassingly quick, after all they were both already running on psychedelic tachycardia, arms around each other, gasping for the same limited oxygen contained in the shrinking space between them and from one another's lungs, and then there was none left, there was a great breaking, like a long wave, an extended silence… and the the rain arrived and patterned in abstract tattoo on the tarp above and the dim, cool light passed the shadow through onto their faces.

Afterward, for a moment, Hawkeye just looked at him beatifically. Then he started laughing again.

“What is it?”

Hawk licked his thumb and passed it over the corner of B.J.’s forehead. “Pollen,” he said. “Where’d my crown go?”

“I dunno, it fell off. It’s around here somewhere.”

“I gotta tell you, that thing made me feel like a real prince.”

“I’ll make you another one.”

They lay down together and B.J. pulled the blanket back up over them both again (it was going to need a good dry-cleaning after all this) and they watched and listened as the thunderstorm rolled in over the trees. Through the tent flap the light and the wind were cool and changed. The wind whispered above in the trees. They lay there beside each other in incredible stillness, listening to the secret. Then the thunder spoke. Hawkeye gasped out loud. In that moment B.J. was sure he knew exactly what the thunder said. He had forgotten what it was by the time he was sober, but he never forgot the certainty.

Lightning flashed. Outside, delighted screams. Someone drummed abstract polyrhythms on a pair of out-of-tune bongos.

“I don't think you’re wrong to be afraid,” Hawkeye said. He was using the voice that wasn’t his shenanigans voice or his schmoozing voice and wasn’t his doctor voice and wasn't his sex voice but was some other miraculous thing, some healing kind of secret, the voice in which B.J. mentally read and re-read all his letters.

“About what?”

“The things you said. About only culture ever changing.”

“Oh. I thought you meant about loving each other enough.”

“I think we addressed that,” Hawk said, meeting his eyes. “Unless you want to address it again, deeper and more thoroughly.”

“Jesus, give me a minute. I’m an old man.”

“Not as old as me!”

“Oh, is it time for you to impart some of your sage wisdom?”

“The only sage wisdom I can offer you is, if you’re going to Scarborough Fair — ”

B.J. would never be able to precisely identify exactly what possessed him to do this, either than that perhaps he had been wanting to do it as a response to Hawkeye’s worst puns for nearly two decades, but he practically pounced, reflexively, like a predatory cat or something, grabbed Hawk by the waist, and set about mercilessly tickling him. He nearly took a knee to the gut for his trouble, and in dodging this, unthinkingly opened up certain sensitive areas of his own body for retributive treatment. Because he was still high, it felt like being unzipped: as though Hawkeye had found the buttons that kept his skin attached to his body and his physical form tethered to this measly three-dimensional plane and had decided it might be a great idea to undo them. He was so incredibly and deliriously happy that it hurt. He knew when this was all done he would probably be able to fly. He wondered if it felt the same for Hawk, but then he realized that he knew it did. What had he remembered, years ago, the last time he felt like this? Something about their souls being adjoining puzzle pieces…

In playfighting like kids or puppies for nearly ten minutes they almost collapsed the tent, which would have been disastrous because of how hard it was raining. It just didn’t rain this hard in California. The vague effect might have been approximated by someone standing on a ladder thirty feet above the tent, roughly aiming a firehose directly at the center pole. And the thunder seemed loud enough to rip the guts out of the world every time it happened, so that when he opened his eyes as it faded he was surprised that time was still going on. Eventually he surfaced from a blinding flash of lightning to find that Hawkeye had pinned him by his wrists against the sodden ground.

“I’m trying to tell you you’re right,” Hawkeye said, hovering above him, breathing hard. “You know I hate that. You better listen to me.”

“I’m listening!”

“Then stop trying to distract me!”

“How in hell am I distracting you? I’m just lying here.”

“That's just the problem, isn’t it? How dare you look so beautiful all the time. You’re a menace.”

B.J. could feel his own heartbeat going in his ears like a mad stenographer, or otherwise that was only the rain. “First you want to tell me I’m right, now you want to tell me I’m beautiful…”

“Don’t let it go to your head. Now can I let go of you, or are you going to keep ravishing me.”

“You don’t want me to ravish you?”

“I don’t know, what was all that about being an old man…”

But then he lay down at B.J.’s side and put his head on B.J.’s shoulder so that B.J. could feel his heartbeat next to his own heartbeat, practically inside his own body, and that was good. That was more than good.

“I’m afraid too,” Hawkeye said eventually. It took B.J. a minute to find the thread of their previous conversation amidst all the other myriad dizzying threads being braided together in his mind. “How can we not be? Clearly nobody learned anything from our generation’s… doomed foibles. Granted, we weren’t quite as colorful and we couldn't get drugs as easy.”

“And all the free love was behind closed doors.”

“Or in the supply tent.”

“You know, I used to get really jealous when you would go meet some nurse there. But I always thought it was just being jealous that you still had wild oats to sow.”

Hawkeye looked up and gave him that crooked grin. “You wanted some of my wild oats.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“That's nothing. You want to hear vulgar? I had this elaborate fantasy — ”

“ — oh, was Lana Turner there?”

“She was nowhere in sight. It was even better: that I had some date, and when I was getting ready in the Swamp, I could feel your eyes following me — ”

“Hawk, they _were_ following you.”

“I know! Has it crossed your mind that that was maybe — but anyway, then you would follow me to the supply tent and slip in behind me and lock the door and give me a real fright and lose your mind pacing and tearing your hair out because you couldn't even tell why it was driving you so insane…”

“And then?”

“Where do you think this is going?”

“Realizing at the worst possible moment that I-Corps sent us ping-pong balls instead of surgical lubricant?”

Hawkeye touched his nose. “Ding ding ding.”

B.J. sighed. Under usual circumstances — in Colorado, for instance — it might have (would have) gotten him pretty hot under the metaphorical collar to co-indulge in one of those old fantasies. Now it felt like the vengeful Greek goddess of nostalgia had hiked up her toga and smashed him on the back of the head with a brick. “It makes me so sad,” he managed. “How much time we wasted.”

“Me too.” Hawk sighed too. He had a musical sigh. The thunder shuddered again, far away off now across the hills and fields. It made B.J. think of shells, which was horribly comforting: he thought he could feel nostalgia winding up for another blow. But then Hawk said, “What if we stopped?”

“Stopped what?”

Hawkeye propped his chin up against the back of his hand and B.J. wrapped the back of his neck in his palm. “Wasting time,” Hawkeye said. For better or worse, he had that look on his face indicating the beginning percolations of what might either be a totally brilliant idea or the stupidest concept ever to be actualized by _homo sapiens._

“You think we can?”

“I think we’d better. I think — the kids I was with today kept saying, the private is political. I like that, don’t you? I don't know if we can change the world, but I know we can live in those values every day if we want to bad enough. Peace and love, isn’t that what they say? So I think — I’m sure we ought to stop wasting time.”

“I think you might be right.”

“Good, because I also think you ought to move to Maine and live with me. You’d be three hours from your daughter’s college, if you need another excuse.”

“You’ve thought about this.

“I sure have.”

“Well, is there anything else?”

“Unfortunately I think we’d better put our clothes on because I'm hungry and I want to see the Band. That’s all.”

It took them another hour to get up, because it was all so lovely and so still, and it felt so good to be naked together and to be touching, and Hawk’s hand was carding very gently through B.J.’s chest hair, and it felt like a dream, because everything made such perfect sense despite being so objectively absurd.

“Hawkeye,” B.J. said.

“B.J.,” said Hawkeye.

“We’re eight miles high, as the Byrds would say.”

His brow shifted quizzically for a moment, and then he started laughing. “You mean the band!”

“Of course I mean the — anyway. D’you really mean all of it?”

Hawkeye propped his chin up again on his fist against B.J.’s chest. “Have I ever lied to you while under the influence of narcotics, psychedelics, the worst gin ever, or any other intoxicating substance as yet known to man or mushroom?”

“Not that I know of. Certainly not the last… very memorable time.”

Satisfied, Hawk put his head back down on B.J.’s shoulder. “The Byrds’ eye view has made everything very clear,” he said.

\--

They fell asleep playing chess, and woke up to the sound of choppers. They fell asleep in the mess tent, and woke up to the sound of choppers. They fell asleep on the bar in the O Club or at Rosie’s, and woke up to the sound of choppers. The moon was cold. The night was sticky. The booze was turning people blind. He slipped and fell in all the blood on the floor of the ambulance. Some teenage private in post-op told a Halloween-type story of watching some poor medic on the front beheaded by chopper blades while trying to calm a wounded man in the sidecar. Charles went to Battalion Aid and came back and they heard from Potter, drunkenly, sworn to secrecy, that the medics up there had filed a report suggesting he get a psychiatric checkup. Hawk went to Battalion Aid and came back with a sheaf of paper he hid under his mattress. Margaret went to Battalion Aid and came back in a seethe. The food was bad, the rain was bad, the cold was bad, their clothes were unbearably rough, they were too flea-bit and skinny to ever want to be seen naked, the showers were cold, the blankets were moth-eaten, the boredom was worst: the boredom in the state of knowing. Twelve hours, eleven, ten. The shelling fading in like an orchestra. Closer and closer and closer and closer until:

_Attention all personnel! The generals have signed off and the other shoe has dropped, repeat, the other shoe has dropped…_

When he was in a bad low, B.J. sat on the edge of his cot staring into space. I’m in hell, he realized. What did I do? When did I even die? Hawk would come in and crouch next to him and squint and strain like a cartoon character. “I don't see it,” he’d say.

“What?”

“Whatever you're staring at that's a thousand yards away.”

“Ha ha.”

He elbowed B.J. in the gut, but gently. “Want a drink?”

What he really wanted was to sleep for a thousand years. He wanted to hold his daughter. He watched Hawkeye read his mind. He was always doing this. B.J. figured this was what happened when you spent so much time with someone else, but it had never happened to him before.

[ It was not difficult to read B.J.’s mind when he was in a state, because he was almost always thinking of the same thing. Sometimes Hawkeye felt like needlepointing _YOU’VE TURNED YOUR WIFE AND CHILD INTO SYMBOLS BECAUSE DEEP DOWN YOU KNOW THEY WILL NOT SAVE YOU_ on a fabric sampler with a bunch of flowers and birds and hanging it above B.J.’s cot. Other times he felt like tattooing on his own chest _I am no less a whole person for being alone, you bastard. I have all the same fucking feelings as a normal person, you poor repressed braggart! How dare you assume I have less to live for and less to go home for than you based on your antiquated, normative notions of what constitutes ‘family.’ Are we not your family? Don't I love you? Also, please fuck me._

More than once he got in late and tried to winnow the blood and filth out from under his fingernails with a sewing needle, absently listening to the sleeping breath around him, the wind and the shells far away, the night watchman’s crunching boots in the gravel, the nurses’ laughter from their tent, chatter in post-op… He thought about how he might execute a prank to gather a bunch of generals and herd them up one of the more contested hills toward the North Korean line. Possibly if he told them there was a steak dinner up there? He started laughing imagining the subsequent court-martial, until he eventually came to the chilling realization that this place had gotten inside him from the boots up.

“Hawk?” When he looked up B.J. had propped himself up on his elbow. “You alright?”

“Yeah — fine. Sorry.”

“Were you laughing or crying?”

“I don’t know. I think both.”

B.J. put on the light above his bed. Across the tent, Charles groaned. “Want to talk about it?” B.J. asked.

Hawkeye scraped his brain for some rough facts on the problematic patients in post-op. Somebody’s fever wouldn’t go down. The feeling in somebody’s toes wasn’t coming back the way he would have liked it to. Somebody had no physical symptoms but was speaking lucidly to his dead mother.

Somebody couldn’t sleep or laugh anymore really without being drunk. Somebody’s libido had hitched a ride out of here and caught a plane to Tokyo months ago. Somebody was being slowly eviscerated by love that was requited platonically enough to be functionally a bandaid over a gushing arterial rupture. Somebody else was losing his entire grip on his self and his reality as he learned the extent to which his wife didn't need him. Somebody else was losing his entire grip on his self and his reality as he learned the extent to which his class could not always isolate him from evil things.

He was aware that every day they were each going through their own different little amputations. War is war, and hell is hell. Inasmuch as this was obviously war, it was nearing hell.

“Margaret’s in there sponging Private Andersen with rubbing alcohol,” Hawkeye said. Sometimes it felt like he was just talking gibberish. “One oh four. Won’t go down.”

“Hell,” said B.J., sitting up. “Could you've left something?”

“I must’ve.” He put his forehead in his palm. “But he won't survive surgery until he cools off.”

“So let's cool him off,” B.J. said. He stood up, swaying a little, knocking over one of the dirty martini glasses by his bedside. “Come on.”

They went together back to post-op in the darkness to pack the kid in ice like a side of beef. What if you told him what was really the problem, said a troublemaking part of Hawkeye's brain in seductive sing-song. He would try to fix it, wouldn’t he?

At dawn he was in the OR again with Andersen on the table, with B.J. as anesthesiologist and Margaret attending, and he decided in the wavering manner of the unslept that this was going to have to be enough. It was going to have to be enough that B.J. loved him enough to help him keep his patients alive. It was a beautiful thought, when you got down to it. It was a badly mismatched love that, unexpressed or misdeployed, might have caused a lot of doubt and pain. Instead it had saved hundreds or even thousands of lives. How could that not be enough? What was wrong with him?

Scalpel, sponge, clamp, hemostat. The last bit of shrapnel rang like a bell in the pan. ]

\--

“I think maybe we got a little ahead of ourselves,” Hawk said as they picked their way back across the muddy fields toward the stage, shoes squelching in inches of muck, damp, knock-kneed, both still sometimes following the last sparking sprites of hallucinogen flirting at the corners of their vision. “In Colorado, I mean.”

“I’d say,” B.J. agreed. “And behind ourselves, and on top of ourselves, and just about every other which way.”

“You made me understand the precise meaning of ‘six ways to Sunday,’” Hawk said.

“That’s nothing. You made me see the face of god.”

It was getting to be sunset. The thunderstorm had long since moved off to the west, leaving in its wake an ecstasy of paintbox color that was probably nigh-incomprehensible even if you weren’t on drugs.

“I felt like you must have been cut apart from me before I was born somehow,” Hawk said. “And I was dead sober.”

“Now you're just trying to one-up me.”

“Maybe so. The point is, talk about zero to sixty in seconds flat.”

“What about all those years we spent courting each other without knowing we were courting each other?”

Hawk waved a hand. There was mud under his fingernails and in the fine lines spiderwebbing his palm. “Those don’t count. We were both deeply repressed — you without knowing and me on purpose. And we were both basically being scraped — tell me if you think of it like this too. It felt like how much I loved you was scoring me out from the inside. And the war was scoring me in from the outside. And I was getting very, very thin. I felt like everybody could see through me at the end.”

“I never thought about it that way,” B.J. said, though he later remembered that sometimes over there he would lie awake in his cot, drunk, listening to Hawk breathing, wondering where it had all gone. They all seemed _less_ , somehow, in the end. “To me it felt like somebody kept putting a heavier and heavier load on my back and I always thought the next one was for sure going to flatten me. But somehow it never did.”

“Basically,” Hawkeye concluded, “we were in no condition to be attempting rational thought about serious matters.”

“And yet they let us do surgery almost every day…”

“Yeah, well, an arterial transplant is one thing, a love affair is another.”

They rounded the edge of the hill and looked down onto the stage and the fields and the forest and before them the incredible sea of people spread out in profound sunset colors, an unending wave, a roar of laughter… the rickety stage seeming miles away, borne aloft on the churning waters, tinnily emitting the sounds of a band they later learned was called Country Joe and the Fish. It took them maybe forty minutes to feel their way halfway down the hill, slipping just about every step in the slick mud and rags of destroyed grass, to an empty spot where they could more or less hear the music. Behind them a group of muddy twenty-somethings laughed, sharing a joint and a carton of orange juice. A few of them flashed B.J. and Hawkeye winks and peace signs as they sat down.

Above them the sun drew low and deep, throwing a wash of golden color across the world. “What do you think we ought to do about it?” B.J. asked.

“About what?”

“Getting ahead of ourselves.”

“Well, I think we ought to catch up.”

“How do we do that?”

“Aren’t we doing it right now?”

They watched Ten Years After while the last of the light bled out of the sky, and then the Band came on at ten, by which time the air was so thick with pot smoke that B.J. might've felt lightheaded if he weren't so high. They opened with “Chest Fever.” Garth Hudson played that organ solo for about a full minute in which B.J. could feel Hawk’s whole body thrill and wished he had been born an organ player. After a minute he supposed he had actually been born another kind of organ player, or otherwise he'd devoted very many years of his life to becoming a very good one, and then he couldn’t stop laughing for a good five minutes, even though Hawk kept elbowing him and telling him to _shh_. He also couldn't stop laughing when the Band played “I Shall Be Released” because of the memory of his own earlier, superior rendition, and when they played “The Weight” the entire crowd was singing and clapping so loudly that he couldn’t hear the music from the stage, and when they closed with a cover of “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever,” Hawk put his poncho over both their heads and they spent the whole song making out, so when all was said and done B.J. could only remember about half the set very clearly, and yet until the day he died he said it was the best show he’d ever seen.

Hours later, it was so late it was early, and they were standing up, ostensibly to keep from falling asleep, except they were leaning on each other while falling asleep much as they used to but hadn't for years, so that it took B.J. a minute to remember where he was when they were vaguely roused by the sight of movement on stage: three men taking positions with stools and guitars. “Who’s this?” B.J. asked bewilderedly.

One of the hippie girls sitting behind them tapped his shoulder. “David Crosby from the Byrds,” she said, counting them off on her fingers, “Stephen Stills from the Buffalo Springfield, Graham Nash from the Hollies.”

“Crosby, Stills, _and_ Nash?”

The girl shrugged. “That’s what they call themselves. Someone said Neil Young is going to play with them too.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Hawkeye, uselessly rustling sleep out of his eyes. "Did you hear that, Beej. Neil Young!”

“My friend’s doing sound,” the girl said. “He gets me the intel. You guys want to share a joint with us?”

Her friends were in varying states of consciousness and bedraggledness. Miraculously, one of them had a dryish joint in an enamel cigarette case in the back pocket of his mud-caked Wranglers.

“I’ve been trying to figure you guys out,” said the girl, sparking it up with her silver zippo. “I think you're the oldest people here apart from Mr. Yasgur.”

“Well, nothing cool was happening when we were your age, so we waited.”

“We were also in medical school.”

“We were also in Korea.”

“We didn't actually want to see any of these bands,” B.J. explained. “We just look for any opportunity to be wet and miserable.”

“Our friendship was forged in the crucible of wet misery,” Hawkeye agreed.

“It’s worth it,” the girl said, passing B.J. the joint. “Worth destroying my shoes. Worth the mud in my bra.”

“Have you seen these guys play before?”

She shrugged. “I saw the Byrds in the city, but I’m a Gene Clark kind of girl. These three, this is their second gig ever.”

“In front of half a million people?”

The girl laughed, taking the joint back from Hawkeye. “There’s a second time for everything.”

They were interrupted by voices onstage, bearing static and feedback though the overloaded amplifiers. “Tell ‘em who we are,” said one of the musicians. But nobody did, so they just started playing. A cheer swept up from the crowd, swept over them, and subsided under the thrill of the music. On stage the blonde man in a poncho at the right of the little trifecta choked his hand up the neck of his acoustic guitar, ringing a series of bright, dancing tones. Then all three of them began to sing in more impeccable harmony than B.J. had known was humanly possible. _It’s getting to the point where I am no fun anymore…_

In his life, he would listen to this song probably thousands of times. He even thought then that he remembered having heard it before, on the radio, or from his daughter’s room at night. None of those subsequent (or prior) listenings were comparable to this moment, though they did remind him of standing in the cold mud on a wet hill squinting through the smoky darkness toward the rickety stage and amps and lights in a way that always brought him joy. But there, in that moment, on that hill, every lyric seemed to unfold from a story actively being written inside his own mind:

_Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now_

_I am not dreaming_

_I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are_

_You make it hard_

Hawkeye put his head on B.J.’s shoulder.

It was always the same story with infinite variations. The story went on and on. The harmonies and the tempos and the tunings changed from movement to movement. But, for better or worse, the story went on and on.

\--

The story B.J. later told himself — and his grandkids, his neighbors, his work buddies, anyone who would listen — about the late 1960s was, of course, complicated, and a bit ahistorical, and necessarily rose-colored. Erin had been so crushingly jealous that her father, of all people, had been at Woodstock, that she hadn’t spoken to him for weeks, and that December she went to a free concert at the Altamont Raceway, and in the early evening called Melinda from a payphone asking urgently for a ride home because someone had been killed. B.J. was at home in Mill Valley with Peg, figuring out the specifics of transferring the mortgage entirely into her name, when Erin came in the door crying and went up to her room without a word. Melinda was just behind her and somberly advised that they put on the TV news to see if they were saying anything yet. It would have been very late over there but in about an hour Hawkeye called in a panic, wanting to know if Erin was okay. B.J. drove his red Ford Galaxie across the country the second week of January 1970 and only sporadically returned to California again. The war went on — and on, and on, and on. When it was over, it didn't feel like it was really over. It just changed.

When he thought of the ‘60s, he thought of August. The latter half of the decade had felt like an August Sunday: in existing necessitating its own swift decay. Its own return to a state of lesser grace. No less beautiful for all it was fleeting by its very nature. When he told Hawkeye this, on the porch of the rickety old house on the ass end of Cliff Island, watching the sun go down at the edge of the cove, Hawkeye thought for a while, and then he said, with an air of poetic contemplation, “In August, it feels like the color is most saturated.”

“That’s what I mean,” B.J. said. “Don’t you think it was?”

Hawkeye didn’t answer. “That’s a nice metaphor,” he said eventually. “But things go bad really quickly in the heat, don’t they? Sometimes before you even notice?”

He was hung up still on how quickly it had all been left behind. He was hung up worst of all on Nixon’s re-election. That seemed to kill something in him. He was a hopeful person who had been burned one too many times, B.J. figured. They had had more than enough vaguely argumentative conversation to the effect of, can’t you just take your own advice and settle for peace and love on the home front? But Hawkeye would say, you know, it’s just that I took this stupid oath to do no harm…

“What do you think about,” B.J. asked him, “when you think about the ‘60s.”

“Hope.” He seemed to be mentally chewing. “Your body. Grass.”

“Which kind?”

Hawk gave him a lecherous kind of grin. “Both.”

He'd had to stop smoking the particularly fun variety owing to the fact that it was making him paranoid. He would start talking about a ‘shadow’ that was ‘spreading.’ B.J. had told him to stop reading _The Lord of the Rings._

“Go back to the hope,” B.J. said.

“You sound like Sidney. Go back to this, go back to that.”

“That’s how you talk. You brush over things.”

“Can't we go back to your body?”

“Maybe later.”

Hawk sighed. “I think about standing on that hill listening to ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’” he said.

“And?”

“ _And_? What else is there?” The edge of the sun touched the edge of the water and the light across the harbor turned into a cool memory. “Only one of those things I was hoping for came true,” Hawk said. “That’s all.”

[ After Nixon got reelected, after disappearing for a couple days, kind of disappearing even and especially to himself, Hawkeye came crawling back to Cliff Island to find his neighbors down front telling him he better go home on the double because B.J. — they said “your husband” — was about to start commissioning all the lobstermen in Cumberland County to drag Casco Bay for his corpse. He went home with his metaphorical tail between his legs and got put in a hot bath. He was pretty sure B.J. burned his clothes. He had forgotten what it felt like to be hungover. It was pretty much the worst feeling in the world, and it was even worse because he was way too old for this. Everything hurt. He fell asleep and when he woke up the bathwater was cold. B.J. was sitting on the toilet seat. “I need your help,” he said.

They put chest waders on and went down to the water to haul the dinghy and the floating dock out and up above the waterline against the ice and the winter storms. “Where’d you go,” B.J. asked him. Huffing and puffing and shoving the little boat in the grainy sand.

Once that was done he had to go throw up. It was just acid and old booze. The smell of it made him heave again and again in a kind of vicious cycle. For a few terrifying minutes he thought it might never stop. When he came back, dizzy, head ringing, they started on the dock. “It was the old place on Congress Street,” Hawkeye told B.J. “You never knew me when I was a Portland drunk but it was my old place.”

“You didn’t do this last time,” B.J. noted.

“I guess I thought it was a fluke. And you spent the entire inauguration weekend ministering to my various wounds.”

“Oh, god, that was inauguration weekend?”

Hawkeye managed a wink, though it jostled his headache. “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate.”

It was dusk by the time they finished. It was not a particularly cold day for November in Maine but Hawkeye’s hangover was wringing him out like a clammy dishcloth. Luckily there was chicken soup in the freezer, and B.J. made him drink some warm ginger concoction while it defrosted on the stove. It got cold and dark quick this time of year.

“You should call your boss,” B.J. said delicately. “They rescheduled your patients. I told him you had the flu.”

Hawkeye rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye socket. He was almost too tired to be infuriated at allowing himself to be taken care of. “Right,” he said. “Thank you.”

The silence was very cold. The soup, somehow, sounded loud against the bowl.

“You can say whatever you want to say,” Hawkeye said eventually. “I can take it.”

“I don’t need to say anything.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Because Mary Cyr said — ”

“Why would I ever guilt you? You do it to yourself so beautifully.”

“I resent that,” Hawkeye grumbled.

“When you finish your soup you can go to bed,” said B.J.

“Okay, mom.”

By the time he managed to get it all down, the last drops were cold. He put his head down on the table for a minute, but then B.J. herded him up the stairs and deposited him on the bed. Every limb must have weighed hundreds of pounds, but it was all he could do to stare out the window, the same way he had when he had first gotten home. Time moved, shifted, changed. Downstairs, B.J. whistled along to the college radio.

He had gone to the bar after work. They had a fucking TV in the waiting room at the hospital now and all everybody ever did was stare at it. All the nurses in the break room clustered around the radio. To think he had been thinking that most people in America were basically good and hated the idea of war and suffering. But sixty percent of Cumberland County had gone for Nixon. The problem was that when you felt so guilty about having one drink you figured you had to have another. And then you felt so guilty about having two that you had to have a third. And not having had a drink for the entire lifetime of thousands of Vietnam War casualties made it so that three really hit you. Then you couldn't really stop. The next thing you knew you didn’t remember where you’d slept for a couple days. It could really happen that fast to anyone. That was the craziest thing. The entire time, he had been closer to the edge than he had known.

He stirred when the door opened and the hall light spilled in. “Why aren’t you asleep,” B.J. said.

“Sixteen years,” Hawkeye told him, watching his reflection in the window. The moon appeared from behind a wisp of cloud. “My sobriety should be sneaking cigarettes at the drive-in movie. Not being… drowned in a stagnant pool of high-proof grain alcohol.”

He could hear B.J.’s clothes rustling and smell his weird cinnamon toothpaste. “Isn’t the whole point that you’re always an alcoholic even when you’re not drinking?” B.J. asked.

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, you still managed sixteen years. That’s longer than most marriages. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have a breach of fidelity every once in a while.”

“Rich coming from you.” Hawkeye turned on his back in the bed only to find that looking at B.J. was excruciatingly painful. “And this is too many contradictory metaphors for what's left of my brain to handle.”

“We can talk about it in the morning,” B.J. said. “On the way to work.”

“Oh, god, work?”

“You want to put a new roof in by yourself next summer?” B.J. asked him, climbing under the covers. “You want Ronson operating on your patients?”

He tried a glare. Whatever expression came out instead made B.J. look very sad.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and let me hold you,” B.J. said.

“Must I? Must you?”

“We must, we must.”

“Okay, fine.”

He still couldn’t sleep even though usually B.J.’s arm around him was like a glass of warm milk. He could feel that B.J. wasn’t sleeping either. He kept sighing these warm, tired sighs into Hawkeye’s hair. It was easy enough to interpret what this meant. “I guess this isn’t what you bargained for,” Hawkeye said.

“I didn’t bargain for anything,” B.J. told him, yawning, “I paid full price and they gave me the whole package.” ]

\--

When B.J. woke up, it was past dawn. They were leaning on each other in the blue chill. Hawkeye had put them both inside his hand-me-down poncho to keep them warm, and the hem was caked with mud. Little spots of dew in the fabric containing reflective universes. Onstage there was an act setting up in the silence. The crowd had shrunk somewhat overnight, with people wandering back to wherever they had left their cars and struggling back to normal Monday life, but around them still were the sounds of tens of thousands of people breathing. The morning was a quiet blue blanket. Sleep, laughter, whispers, the atomization of a little wake-and-bake joint…

Next to him B.J. felt Hawkeye stir. Life came back into his limp sleepy hand and it wrapped gently around B.J.’s thigh under the poncho. “I had a dream about Korea,” Hawk said, yawning.

“Was it okay?”

“It was a nice one. It was springtime.”

“Right,” B.J. remembered. “The annual beautiful day.”

“We were having a picnic. You looked young. I felt young! I can still taste that gin.”

“I can too,” B.J. said, “whenever I think hard enough about mothballs.”

Hawk cackled. “What time is it,” he asked.

“Who knows. Actually, I don’t even know if time exists here. It’s Monday morning, so they say.”

“How can it possibly be Monday,” Hawkeye said.

“Time flies when you’re having mud.”

The sky was turning clear. And all the green. Everyone was waking up — he could almost believe that then. The world was waking up.

“It was a nice dream,” Hawkeye said again. “You know, some days, the sun in the haze in those mountains…”

“You don’t have bad dreams much anymore,” B.J. noticed.

“I just don’t have them when I sleep with you.”

“Why?”

“Because whenever we sleep together, so far that is, I mean we really sleep together, and you basically sedate me.”

I want to sleep with you all the time and not only sleep with you when I sleep with you, B.J. thought. “Did you mean what you said,” he asked instead. The light of day wasn't exactly cold, but nothing impossible was happening anymore. “Do you really want me to come to Maine and live with you?”

“I’d have to be crazy.” Hawkeye’s mouth twisted. “It’s a good thing I am. Moreover, you’d have to be crazy.”

“It’s a good thing I am too.”

At nine in the morning, the fields were a wreck of mud and discarded fabric, the sun diffuse behind low clouds, kids scattered in loose fiefdoms across the ruined bowl, and Jimi Hendrix came on stage. White fringe and beads, white stratocaster, red bandanna. Nobody ever made that kind of magic with a guitar before or since, that much was clear from the first note of “Message of Love.” B.J. hadn’t known human beings could manipulate anything to make that kind of sound. Toward the end of his set, Hendrix played the national anthem, but he played it as a real story about America without any of the pomp or prettiness. Inside it, the bombs were falling and kept falling.

After this, when the last note died, B.J. understood, it would be the future or the end. They would all have to choose. And after they chose, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious which was which. Like a photograph, the story would take a long time to develop. Someday it might be very clear.

It happened sooner than he wanted it to. It would have been easier if the music went on forever. His ears kept ringing, though, for a couple days. It was midday, the sun was high. Beside him, Hawk was coming back around from wherever he had been transported by the great beauty and terror. Their eyes met, and B.J. could tell that they had seen something different in all of it.

The first choice was to keep believing that love could be enough. He chose it.

“What’s next?” B.J. asked Hawkeye.

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye said. But he put his open hand out into the space between them. “Let’s see.”

B.J. took Hawk’s hand and they set off together into the end of the morning, into the end of the decade, into the beginning of the mystery, across the ravaged fields toward the car.

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> first of all, if you are american, please vote, and wherever you live, please keep organizing in your communities for a better world and a dignified life for all. unionize your workplace! give to your local mutual aid fund! 
> 
> second of all, [here is a playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUOOrUsXBWI&list=PLLhOuTXiAdgkQjYwsHb7cLLjZ99-shtJJ) of most of the songs mentioned in this story. i hadn't realized how many performances at woodstock had been recorded. those recordings are included in this playlist where possible. 
> 
> this story is named after the fifth part of [eliot's 'the waste land.'](https://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html)
> 
> my knowledge of religion is very limited and i have never done psychedelic drugs, so please feel free to correct me if i've gotten anything wrong. i started writing this the day after i watched _goodbye, farewell, and amen_ for the first time three weeks ago. if you can pick up all the references to random mash episodes i'll owe you something.


End file.
